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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 ...

In jokes: Jest End @Waterlooeast

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It's only on until Sunday 5 December, but Jest End at the Waterloo East theatre is a bit of a guilty pleasure of fine singing and silly musical send ups. Billed as London's answer to Forbidden Broadway, the show takes barbs at various successful (or not quite successful shows), social media obsessed actors and low pay. You don't need to be a musical theatre aficionado to enjoy the silliness of it all. But it probably helps... Particularly as many of the in-jokes are ripped from local news headlines, gossip and sending up themselves...