The production is delightful. It offers the now-57-year-old musical levity. As it opens, the lighting is rich with nuance. It feels like you’re gazing at a tableau of Rembrandt’s 1635 Belshazzar’s Feast not only for its colouration, but also in the evoked debauchery, teetering on the edge of biblical taboo.
‘Bitter Winter’ happens in a waiting room. It’s about apartheid and the shifting of the world from analogue to digital. It’s about how tightly one holds onto one’s embarrassing and life-forming secrets as it is about being in the same proverbial boat as another actor, regardless of age or experience.
WHEN YOU THINK of Amadeus, Peter Shaffer’s perfectly wonderful play of 1979 that cast mischievous light into the mysterious nooks and untold crannies of the life of 18th century Vienna composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the first thing that comes to mind is the music, that Confutatis from Mozart’s […]
THE SIMPLE, TIMELESS lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel are the kinds of conjoined words and ideas that may have slipped so quietly into your sensibilities that you may not remember how well you know them, until you’re sitting in the audience of the revue of the Simon and […]
PICTURE THE FAMOUS bit of Western classical musical composed in 1928 by Maurice Ravel and called Boléro translated into raw sobs. Picture a professional mourner at a cemetery and a cast of close to 40 in costumes magicked to life by Black Coffee. Picture it all against a […]
THE WELSH VILLAGE of Aberfan in October of 1966 weathered a catastrophe worse than anyone could have imagined. At 09:15 in the morning of an otherwise ordinary but wet day, a colliery spoil tip slid down the mountain and drowned a primary school in a 12m-deep avalanche of […]
CROSS OUT ANY plans you may have for tomorrow, Sunday October 14. The achingly brief season of Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis under the direction of Alby Michaels ends on that day, and it is a production you will deeply regret if you miss it. Of the calibre of Molière’s […]
SEXUALITY, SONG AND the fear of losing what matters comes under the loupe in Choir Boy, a hard-hitting, yet simple play which is sensitively and relevantly translocated from an American context to a local one. Comprising a cast of four young men who articulate the groups and cliques, […]
VERY OCCASIONALLY, SOMETHING comes along which not only ticks every conceivable box in terms of a great production, but it also sets the audience on fire with delicious abandon, and has otherwise demure people dancing in the aisles like demons; people who will drive home with the CD […]
Remember Sesame Street and the values it espoused on generations of children? Well, 15 years ago, the makers of Avenue Q worked with its basic puppetting premises and ramped it up to a whole new set of narrative values. Now, in its 15th year, it explodes in a […]
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