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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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Jesus, It’s Christmas: An Act of God @thevaultsuk

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God is back, and she wants to correct the record in 90 minutes on a stage under Waterloo Station. If that seems like a fair enough premise for you, then An Act of God is currently playing through to the new year at The Vaults . It’s such a mild satirical piece that you’ll be smirking out loud rather than laughing out loud. However, as an alternative Christmas experience with a terrific bar and an enthusiastic cast, it’s mostly harmless. God has come to London to correct the record on a range of misinterpretations of her Ten Commandments. The Palladium was unavailable, but the damp space of The Vaults was free. This time around the tablets are different (an IPad of course) and so are the messages about leaving God out of the war, travelling or sex. New material has been added to keep it topical. But the comic timing seems off and attempts to introduce theological debate into the proceedings fall flat. This makes the reissuing of the 10 commandments feel a bit of a chore. Or lik...
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