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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 ...

New pics from @memphismusical

New production images have been released for Memphis the musical, which has its opening night on Thursday 23 October.  

Led by Beverley Knight as club singer ‘Felicia Farrell’ and Commitments star Killian Donnelly as radio DJ ‘Huey Calhoun’ it follows the fame and forbidden love of a radio DJ who wants to change the world and a club singer who is ready for her big break. And looks like it has some snappy dance numbers too... Pictures by Johan Persson.









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