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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 ...

Opening tonight: Neville's Island

The West End production of the comedy Neville's Island opens at the Duke of York’s Theatre tonight, Tuesday 21st October.

Following its run at the Chichester Festival last year, the show is booking to Saturday 3rd January 2015.


The cast features Adrian Edmondson (reprising his performance as Gordon from the Chichester run), Miles Jupp, Neil Morrissey and Robert Webb.

Written by Tim Firth and directed by Angus Jackson, it is about four out-of-condition, out-of-their-depth businessmen on an out-of-control team-building exercise, and marks the plays return to the West End 20 years after it was first seen at the Apollo Theatre.




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