Reviews

With The Pearlfishers Michael Gow has provided Opera Q with one of their most satisfying productions of recent years. Gloriously sung by the principals and chorus, Bizet’s much-maligned score is not just a one-hit wonder as some believe, but a work of infinite romantic beauty.

Here is a show from Bristol Old Vic which has to be one of the most original, intelligent, energetic, disciplined, funny-yet-horribly-sad shows I have seen.  Ostensibly, it is about ‘sports’, but more accurately about the culture of sports - a kind of meta-sport since the sports being played on stage merge and make no distinction between gridiron, baseball, basketball and ice hockey.  It is a show about the huge investment of emotion made in sport, about the ephemeral elation of winning and the self-loathing despair of losing. 

Jesus Christ Superstar as staged by BMMS is a hi-tech, hi-energy, spectacle. The show’s setting has been changed to a post-apocalyptic future, with plenty of wild-looking types and lots of dancing. Lots of dancing. Imagine Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome re-staged as a School Spectacular.

Ray Cooney’s farce Run for Your Wife belongs in the trouser-dropping tradition of Carry On movies with lots of broad sexual innuendo and characters that include vacuous bimbos, bumbling police-officers and stereotypical gays.

Hapless taxi-driver John Smith has two wives, two flats, and a split-second timing schedule as he juggles both. It all unravels one night when he gets mugged and ends up in hospital. That’s the premise of this comedy that ran 9 years in the West End.