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Showing posts with the label Sabrina Mahfouz

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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 ...

Chop it up: Chef @Sohotheatre

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One woman’s descent from a haute-cuisine head-chef to convicted inmate provides for some mouth watering entertainment in Sabrina Mahfouz’s Chef at the Soho Theatre . While it is not necessarily an unexpected journey, it provides enough interest for its short duration to make you wish you were not watching it on an empty stomach. It all starts with a peach. With the simplest of ingredients,   Jade Anouka takes us through a range of courses that track her culinary career and the events that lead to her ending up in jail. Food as her passion comes out more strongly in this piece than the stories of her troubled teenage years, domestic life and the need to keep things level while behind bars. The dialogue is so evocative of food, its preparation and presentation that it is bound to make you hungry.