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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 ...

Scenes from Clapham Common Saturday 17:19




The common is a little busier this weekend with the 2-day Metro Weekender on. Punters without a ticket to the event (which sold out) could sort of pick up the music just outside the fenced off area...

If the amount of news space devoted on the subject are any measure, the locals seem to get very excited about the noise that is generated from the handful of concerts staged every year on the common. Depending on how the wind blows, it seems to be either muffled noise or nothing at all... One unintented consequence of these concerts is some very good looking people descend upon SW4 and that can only be a good thing surely...?

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