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Showing posts with the label Alix Sobler

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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 ...
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Sweat shops: The Great Divide @Finborough

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  The Great Divide uses the worst industrial accident in history as the backdrop to explain the lives and times of some of the workers who lived and perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.  It is playing on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at the  Finborough Theatre  until 20 September.  What is exciting about Alix Sobler's piece is how fragments of stories comes together to tell a much bigger one about immigration, dreams and unionisation against the backdrop of the deadliest workplace disaster in American history.    The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was on the lower east side of Manhattan located on the top floors of an 11 storey building. Most of its workers were migrants working for low pay and long hours. The custom and practice in factories was to lock doors and limit exits to prevent theft. Smoking was banned but people did anyway.  So when fire broke out on 25 March 1911, the combination of flammable materials and no means o...
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