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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 ...

Rubbing the wrong way: The Red Lion @Trafstudios

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Patrick Marber commented that his play The Red Lion dramatises something about England. One part is about community and belonging, and the other part is about business. But it also could be about not being terribly good at the sport, either in playing it or managing it unless you're importing it. It's currently playing downstairs at Trafalgar Studios . It's a locker room comedy-drama set in a semi-professional football club in the north. Kidd (Stephen Tompkinson) as manager has spotted Jordan's (Dean Bone) potential and puts him on as a reserve. But his real plan is to transfer him to another team. With a transfer, he and the club stands to gain financially.