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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 ...

News: Amy Winehouse goes green (and starchy)


Amy Greenhouse, originally uploaded by Andrew Orange.

And speaking of the West End Whingers, they have been enjoying their success and publicity with their award-winning vegetable sculpture of Amy Winehouse - Amy Greenhouse at the Lambeth Country Show over the weekend... But controversy has erupted with a suggestion the runner up, which was a vegetable arrangement of the characters from The Magic Roundabout were robbed...

Apart from being totally biased I thought the better sculpture won... Well whatever the case, the news has been far more interesting than Amy Winehouse as a wax model...

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