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Showing posts with the label 2012

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High anxiety: Collapse - Riverside Studios

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It’s a brave or maybe slightly provocative production to use Hammersmith Bridge on their artwork for a show called Collapse, which is about how everything collapses—poorly maintained bridges, relationships, and jobs. Nothing works. That’s probably too close to home for Hammersmith residents stuck with a magnificently listed and useless bridge on their front door. It gets even weirder when you realise the piece is staged in what looks like a meeting room with a bar. However, keeping things together in the most unlikely of circumstances is at the heart of Allison Moore's witty and engaging four-hander, which is currently having a limited engagement at Riverside Studios . The piece opens with Hannah (Emma Haines) about to get an injection from her husband (Keenan Heinzelmann). They’re struggling for a baby, and he’s struggling to get out of bed. But he managed to give her a shot of hormones before she started worrying about the rest of the day. She’s unsure she will keep her job with ...
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Compelling tragedies: Otello

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Opening night of Verdi's Otello at the Royal Opera House was a thrilling affair. Passion, rage and jealousy explode from this piece from the start. Conductor  Antonio Pappano  makes the most of both the drama and tenderness of the piece as it ebbs and flows. One moment of intensity and emotion gives way to another so delicate and light. Aleksandrs Antonenko is terrific in the title role as the doomed hero and strikes the right balance and tone between tenderness and fury that makes the drama coherent and believable. There was some fine music making between him and Anja Harteros, who plays Desmemona his wife, as they move from a delicate love duet towards a darker sinister end. It is hard to believe that within two hours they sing about love and then damnation, but here they are complimentary. Lucio Gallo was sublime as the evil Iago who orchestrates it all. At the curtain it was hard to tell whether cheering or hissing at his evil brilliance would have been more approp...
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Dusk in a muddy park: Babel

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Babel , billed as one of the theatrical events of 2012 (in a year that no doubt will be full of these) is currently playing at Caledonian Park in North London. It's part street theatre, part performance art, part art and craft, part singing and part muddy field. It's a lot of parts but it is a pretty ambitious piece that brings together a story of a city like London where people are from all corners of the world and representing a variety of cultures and backgrounds...
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