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A night at the opera: That Bastard Puccini! (Park Theatre)

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It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been 130 years since Puccini first premiered La Boheme. Nowadays, it’s a revered classic, and guaranteed to be on any opera company's annual programme if it needs to stay afloat. It’s a crowd pleaser with its melodrama of poor, impoverished artists loving, starving and dying in Paris. But Puccini’s La Boheme had a less auspicious beginning, with one of his contemporaries accusing him of stealing his idea and being poorly received on its first outing. And that’s at the heart of That Bastard Puccini! Currently playing at Park Theatre , writer James Inverne uses the friendship and rivalry between the two composers, Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, to weave a comic tale of creative frustration with an awful lot of facts and tidbits about the opera scene at the time. It’s part comedy, part music appreciation.  It opens with Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) at home with his wife Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood), cursing about Puccini’s latest work, which is drawn ...
Location Location

To think I was considering moving to the East End - Mile End to be particular and just yesterday a bit of meat cleaver incident happened at Mile End tube station.

WC1 seems so much more sensible. Especially since I have found that there is an Italian cafe nearby that sells the best coffee I have tasted in London for just £1... I am easily pleased...

Dialects

Was talking about accents to a manager here who is Melbournian and returning to Oz shortly... She was scoffing that neither of us have strong accents and I went... "Naaaooooooooh we doooaaaant".

She is so Melbourne with her dark clothes and dark makeup... Actually some people referred to her as the "Ice Queen" so I would just tell them that's what all Melbournians are like... They wear dark clothing and sit in inexpensive restaurants offering quality food while espousing liberalism while downing a double expresso...

I tell them as well that you can't do that in Brisbane because it is too hot and that makes the coffee taste bitter... In Brisbane you have to have a surfie hairdo and a bit of facial growth under your lip. Then I add, "Well, that's what it was like back in 2003!"

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