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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 ...

Last chance: Curtain Call @RoundhouseLDN

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Arad’s Curtain Call at the Roundhouse has completed its summer season of live performances. But you have until the end of the bank holiday weekend to see the installation before the silicon rods are packed away. Created by Arad in 2011, it's made up of 5,600 silicon rods suspended from an 18 metre diameter ring. The curtains first appeared in 2011 and returned this year as part of the Roundhouse’s Bloomberg Summer. The live performances with invited guests were part of a series of late night events. Closing the live performances on Thursday were the London Contemporary Orchestra . With a combination of cool music and vocals, it was a reflective and sophisticated musical experience.