Posts

Showing posts with the label James Graham

Featured Post

A night at the opera: That Bastard Puccini! (Park Theatre)

Image
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 ...
Read more...

Cough medicine: Quiz

Image
You don’t often expect to go to a show where coughing during the performance is essential part of it. James Graham’s Quiz at Noel Coward Theatre elevates a minor moment in history into a melodrama fit for television. The story is around the trial of Charles and Diana Ingram who were convicted of trying to defraud the quiz show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” in 2003. Mostly through a series of well-timed coughs. Cameras roll, music roars, the mob votes on little gizmos. There’s even a nod to the humble pub quiz as its origins. It is fun. But it’s also a night that leaves you thinking about another quiz show. Pointless. The production is drunk on the television gimmicks it’s trying to critique. The glamour of television, instant polls and dazzling lighting.  All come at the expense of character development and a convincing argument about confirmation bias. You get a chance to vote on whether they’re guilty twice. Once before interval and once at the end. It’s set up to get people t...
Read more...

Myopic memories: This House

Image
Top ten things about politics you might learn from catching This House at the Garrick: 1. It's a game of cat and mouse It's a relentless cat and mouse game set in the bowels of the Palace of Westminster as the whips for the conservatives and labour try to keep their members in line. There isn't much drama but an awful lot of comedy in retelling the period of the minority Labour government from 1974-1979. 2. It ends in tears There is so much comedy that it is easy to forget that country was a mass. Mass strikes, garbage on the streets, high inflation, policies failing to pass. It's all fun and games until someone needs to go begging for an IMF loan ... 3. Maybe you just had to be there Whether you understand or care about the show probably does depend on whether you lived through the period. The piece does hurl large chunks of parliamentary tradition at the audience in the guise of dialogue to new members. But ultimately it feels like a memory piece for th...
Read more...