94 stories by "Alexandra Coghlan"
We haven't seen a lot of Smetana's The Bartered Bride in the UK recently. Bohemia's best-loved opera is rapidly becoming one of the repertoire's best-kept secrets, which is a shame because i…
God it's good to have the Linbury back. The reopening of the Royal Opera House's second, smaller space last December after a lengthy redesign brought with it all kinds of possibilities. Repe…
BlurbIs it possible that Kasper Holten, Covent Garden's outgoing director of opera, has directed a Meistersinger about himself It certainly looks a lot like it. This black take on Wagner's s…
'What a very singularly deep young man that deep young man must be' You don't have to look very far in selfie-taking 2017 for an equivalent to the narcissism and aestheticism that are so tho…
If a sad tale really is best for winter, then we've certainly been blessed this year. For months the news has croaked out its nightly stories, each blacker than the one before, and though bl…
What did you do during the war, Dada Somewhere underneath the relentless punning and the pastiche, the whistle-stop wit and the whirling theoretical debate, there's a seriousness to Tom Stop…
It couldn't have been better timed. When Gerald Barry started work on his latest project - an operatic take on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - the world was still rotating smoothly on its…
Three sixty-something retired scientists talk to one another in a remote seaside cottage for two hours. It doesn't sound like theatrical gold, but in Lucy Kirkwood's deft hands, an unassumin…
Beautiful, unknowable Lulu - all things to all men, who has never pretended to be anything by what men see in me - is the chameleon-heroine revealed in Berg's musical mirror. But just as she…
Glass panels, windows and boxes on stage should always be treated with mistrust. There can be no clearer indication of blood to come - a literal trigger warning, a physical spatter alert. Th…
Composed when Shostakovich was just 21 years old, fresh from the conservatoire and still high on the success of his First Symphony, The Nose is a piece of musical rebellion - a fantasy of ab…
You have to get through an awful lot of shell to even glimpse the jewel at the core of The Pearl Fishers. Bizet's opera is much more than just a good duet - the score is glossy with melody, …
The first thing you hear are the marimbas " music that's pounded, punched out of the air by hundreds of fists. Later the instruments give us dances and songs, but this musical violence is ne…
When Catherine Malfitano's Tosca debuted in 2010, English National Opera finally had a production of Puccini's classic to rival Jonathan Kent's long-serving version up the road at Covent Gar…
English National Opera has been having a hard time with Don Giovanni lately. First there was Calixto Bieito's groggy, pastel-coloured nightmare who could forget the pistachio leather dentist…
The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in r…
What price a human soul? That's the question Marlowe's Doctor Faustus asks " a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still l…
Part Biblical melodrama, part Carry On Up The Colosseum, with a bit of Horrible Histories thrown in for good measure, it's hard to see how John Wolfson's wildly uneven The Inn at Lydda gradu…
London's West End may be the envy of the world, but when it comes to musicals the big-hitting theatres might have to up their game a bit if they're to keep up with the city's rival offerings…
There's a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn't the one of Shakespeare's making. So legendary are the work's difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each new pro…
Last seen at the National Theatre over 10 years ago, Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera is back in a new adaptation by Simon Stephens. But looking at Rufus Norris's epic-theatre-lite pr…
Simon McBurney and Complicite have made plays about many things " maths, circuses, immigration, Japan, old age " but, at core, they're all really about the same subject: storytelling. Their …
Satire, we're solemnly instructed in Dougal Irvine's new musical The Buskers Opera, "has to strike a fine balance of entertainment and teaching". Well yes, but it's also generally wise (disc…
For a play about silence " its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to "persuade when speaking fails" " The Winter's Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only Cymbeline c…
There's a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline " Shakespeare's late tragicomedy of love and jealousy " in the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play Shakespea…
