ENO Turns Coliseum into Musicals House???
Date: 26 July 2004
Last year’s production of Sweeney Todd made history at the Royal Opera House, the first musical there since the building opened in 1892 (See News, 16 Dec 2003), but if rivals around the corner from Covent Garden have their way, musicals on London’s leading opera stages will become much more common in future. According to the Sunday Times, English National Opera artistic director Sean Doran plans to incorporate musicals into the Coliseum programming on a regular basis in future, starting with new productions of Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town and West Side Story and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The musicalisation of the Coliseum is part of a bid to broaden the appeal of opera which, Doran tells the newspaper, is in danger of dying as an art form. Other changes he plans to introduce later this summer include film and modern music nights and the commissioning of two new operas a year. The first, scheduled for 2006, will be based on the real-life story of Libyan dictator Colonel Gadaffi.
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