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Showing posts with the label Nikhil Vyas

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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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We have ways of making you think: The Mosinee Project @newdiorama

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The revolution is partially re-enacted to scare the pants off an unsuspecting midwestern American town in The Mosinee Project. The piece, which was initially seen at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, is a retelling of the actual fake communist invasion of 1950s America, organised by ex-communists and funded by the American Legion. It's also an attempt to understand why a town would decide to stage a mock communist takeover, what it says about fear, and how it was a harbinger for a much darker period that would mark the Red Scares and witch hunts of the 1950s. It's currently playing at the New Diorama Theatre . Writer-director Nikhil Vyas deconstructs this obscure historical event, exploring what drives fear and how the use of the media to generate attention can manipulate viewpoints while assembling various facts behind the planning and preparation of the day. This includes exploring the motivations behind two ex-communists—Joseph Zach Kornfeder and Benjamin Gitlow—brought in b...
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