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.
Review: Awaking Beauty
December 23, 2008
Date reviewed: 20 December 2008
Venue: Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough
Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s final play as Stephen Joseph Theatre’s artistic director is a musically idiosyncratic piece. According to actor Ben Fox, who plays the “Pigcutter” in Awaking Beauty, the first fibres of inspiration to write a musical in which almost all the music is created by human voices came to Ayckbourn when he watched a Honda advert in which the sounds of a car are replicated by human voices. Hence the music in this playful sequel to Sleeping Beauty, written by Denis King, is for one piano and ten voices.
Review: The Nutcracker
December 19, 2008
Date reviewed: 17 December 2008
Venue: Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House
Christmas on the stages of Leeds has a conservative tint this year. The City Varieties is always staunchly traditional, of course, as the platform for yearly pantomimes (this year it’s Jack and the Beanstalk). The West Yorkshire Playhouse, on the other hand, is hosting its co-production of Peter Pan – admittedly a musical, but still faithful to the narrative that is one of the festive season’s vertebrae – and the debut of Mike Kenny’s adaptation of The Snow Queen, a tale whose juxtaposition of warm, resolute emotions with a chilly, forbidding backdrop imbue it with potential to achieve similar status.
Review: The Snow Queen
December 14, 2008
Date reviewed: 9 December 2008
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
Even before the performance of Mike Kenny’s adaptation of The Snow Queen, directed by Gail McIntyre, got underway I had begun to fall under its spell – drawn into the enchanted world by Hannah Clark’s hauntingly beautiful and evocative stage set. Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale The Snow Queen is an intensely visual story; its powerful images stay in the mind, and Clark harnesses this aspect to great effect. Clusters of miniature dwellings and huge outlines of bare winter trees are all starkly depicted in white yet overlaid with extracts from Andersen’s text – a constant visual reminder that for all its apparent familiarity, this is the landscape of story.
Review: A Christmas Fairytale
December 14, 2008
Date reviewed: 13 December 2008
Venue: Hull Truck Theatre
Hull Truck’s last Christmas in the old Spring Street Theatre is typically busy. Rob Hudson returns to take the lead in the revival of Gordon Steel’s A Kick in the Baubles (reviewed on the national What’s on Stage site in 2005) whilst Nick Lane’s latest children’s play, A Christmas Fairytale, averages two morning/afternoon performances daily.