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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 ...

Art: Yoko Ono smiles and light reflections

The Serpentine Gallery is currently showing Yoko Ono's To the Light. It is an opportunity to view new installations and films from Ono and escape what has been a busy summer period of sports. One of the things that keeps recurring as a theme is the role of the artist and the viewer, along with perspectives on peace, war and happiness.

It is hard not to like an exhibition that makes you take your shoes off and get lost in a maze to the amusement of others in the gallery, or watch a collection of smooth and hairy bottoms move about.

As the above video clip notes, technology has finally caught up with many of Yoko Ono's more ambitious ideas and this one is to capture the smiling face shot of everyone in the world. You are invited to sit down and have a photo taken and then it will be posted onto the Flickr page for #smilesfilm. It is bound to have you leave the gallery smiling, unless you are horrified by the results of your mug shot blown up on a giant video screen by the door.

The exhibition continues until 9 September and for those not in London you can find a variety of technological solutions to send your smiling mug into the #smilesfilm global collaboration via the website, app, social media et cetera...

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