Review: Skin Deep
January 18, 2009
Date reviewed: 16 January 2009
Venue: Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House
Two world premieres in just over a year is an impressive record for Opera North, though, as any composer knows, the second staging can prove the difficulty. Last season’s wonderfully successful The Adventures of Pinocchio will surely return soon and is about to get new life on a DVD release, but the prospects for Skin Deep, once it’s completed runs at co-producers Bregenzer Festspiele and the Royal Danish Opera, seem to me more uncertain.
Tom Bidwell and Justin Audibert on Company Along the Mile
January 15, 2009
I imagine that Tom Bidwell is fairly confident that a certain former flame doesn’t read his interviews. He tells me that Stella, a character in his debut play Company Along the Mile “is based on an ex-girlfriend of mine. English was her second language, so she used to say things like ‘why do you have to terrorize me all the time?’ There’s something about those turns of phrase that I think is fascinating. I love that you can build characters around one saying and one situation.” Stella, you see, is a transvestite and lifestyle fantasist who insists on having sandwiches cut into triangles and pays the other main character, George, for his company each Wednesday in a Blackpool hotel room.
Richard Ashton on the Howard Assembly Room
January 10, 2009
“We’ve made sure that we can host not just a song or solo recital at an end stage, but also an 80-piece orchestra,” says Richard Ashton. “For that, you have to have reflective and absorbent properties. If you have an orchestra of 80, you want more of an absorbent acoustic, so we open some shutters to reveal absorbent material. If there’s an end recital piece, which is more intimate and small-scale, then we close the shutters to give a more reflective acoustic. We have acoustic curtains as well – the two ends of the space are treated with acoustic material. The architects have worked very hard to create a multi-purpose space.”