A Crack Production

Cape Town Opera's PORGY AND BESS at the Coliseum





We’re not ones to tut-tut about moral standards in the London theatre but this is the second show in two nights where the eponymous heroine does cocaine onstage. And you don’t expect that from the Gershwins.

In Thom Southerland’s clever and noir-ish Mack and Mabel at Southwark Playhouse, the darker side of Mabel Normand’s character is explored and like many early Hollywood stars she relied on such stimulants to get her through a punishing schedule. When in Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi‘s incandescent physical and vocal performance in Cape Town Opera’s grandiose production, Bess asks Sportin’ Life for a wrap of "happy dust" we were struck by the similarities. Both have made unsuitable choices in life, and realization of their mistakes comes too late to save either of them.

Last seen in London as a self-assured but awkward Carmen Jones at the Festival Hall in 2007, Maswanganyi is an unconventionally great Bess. Beautiful as a pre-tantrum Naomi Campbell, angular, alert and blatantly provocative, it’s perhaps hard to understand why she’s drawn to either the lumpen and bullying Crown, great resonant strength from Ntobeqo Rwanka, or why she rejects him in favour of the sexually innocent cripple Porgy, here given equal measures of resilience and pathos in Xolela Sixaba's rich and silken bass-baritone.  Their duet "Bess You Is My Woman Now" is deeply affecting. Although at 2 hours 45 there are lulls in the action, we found a vast amount to enjoy in Christine Crouse’s epic, stage-filling production but wondered how much was added by the transposition from the American depression so specifically to 1970s Soweto. There are some well-exploited opportunities to Africanise the dance rhythms and chorus intonations, and all the invocations of Jesus make for an authentic revival meeting sound but it also makes a nonsense of the plot in the second half where a ship and several fishermen are lost at sea, since Johannesburg is 500km inland.

There are some great cameos, we really warmed to the “honey man” voice of Andile Tshoni as Peter and the fierce pride and stunning rapping of Miranda Tini as statuesque shopkeeper Maria, the scene where she upbraids Victor Ryan Robinson’s oily and sinuous sleazeball Sportin’ Life is a treat.


written for Londonist and published on 13 July 2012

Duncan Rock Opera

It’s a weekend night and we’re standing in Heaven cruising the hot bodies on stage and the trendy polysexual crowd below. The only differences from 1987 are that this time we’re not high on a cocktail of coke and poppers, and the music’s by the boy Mozart rather than the Boy George.

It’s only a few days since we were complaining that ‘railway arch opera’ was stuck in a rut, but here it escapes tunnel vision with a compelling and finely-sung production of Don Giovanni, directed at a cracking pace by Dominic Gray.

Where it scores big is in the casting and production values: Duncan Rock isn’t some third-year student from Guildhall in skinny jeans and a sailor tat but has a string of solid opera credentials from Glyndebourne and ENO and his mountainous pecs are candy for the ‘barihunk’ brigade (followers of hotter male singers). Instead of a pub piano there’s a proper 10-piece orchestra suitably string-heavy for the busy Mozart arpeggios, it’s a promenade performance with a main stage and four other set-pieces from Wimpy Bar to sex shop defining the time and place as Soho, 1987.

Best, it has a filthy modern hilarious libretto by Ranjit Bolt that not only hammers home the cruelty and vulgarity – just like the original, really – but makes an easily understandable new story out of the deconstructed and gender-bent opera: apart from the Don all the women’s roles are sung by men and vice-versa, none better than Zoe Bonner’s razor-tongued Leo (Leporello), the PA from hell whose rendition of the 'catalogue aria' enumerating his many conquests from Clapham Common to the club’s own toilets is glorious.

Then there’s the audience – instead of 50 faithful followers in the upstairs room of a pub, we’re a proper club crowd of 400 and, that rare thing in any London audience, smiling throughout. It’s true that even the ENO and the Royal Opera House now take liberties with Don Giovanni, right up to full-frontal nudity and simulated sex, and this production doesn’t go quite so far. But if you want to FEEL liberated, this show charting the ambiguous sexual freedoms of the 80s is for you.

It’s unfortunate that technical issues mean they can’t use radio mikes and the impressive sound (and lighting) rig at Heaven – but the solution is to move round with the characters, maybe a bit of ushering could be introduced, and get as close as you can to the action. It’s worth it.

Written for Londonist and published on 16 April 2012

Wagner's Other World

Parsifal – The ENO at The London Coliseum

Writer: Richard Wagner

Translator: Richard Stokes

Director: Nikolaus Lehnhoff

Conductor: Mark Wigglesworth

Reviewer: Johnny Fox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

As a first-timer at a Wagner opera (is this ‘losing my Waginity?) I wondered what was the thread that binds his audiences in such strong defence of his work, and whether I’d feel any different afterwards.

The first thing to note is how expert this particular Coliseum audience was at going to the theatre. Sociable until the lights went down then there was not a sound, or a cough, or a sweet wrapper, or a watch bleep … and that made it all the more pleasurable to respond to the breadth and brilliance of one of the most complex, yet accessible, pieces I’d ever seen.

First impression is that it’s different from the clowning and fripperies which so often attend Italian opera – no mistaken identities, bewigged countesses posing as their maids, or page boys jumping from windows … this is weightier and yet somehow also weightless stuff as it seems to spin in the air like the metaphoric meteor which is part of the austere and symbolic set by Raimund Bauer and coolly lit by Duane Schuler. We’re in a cleft of time and space which is beyond the earthly world and its moral judgements. If the Tardis were to appear downstage right, it would be entirely appropriate.

The plot has multiple themes of filial loyalty, knightly chivalry, and custody of a holy relic which could appeal to followers of Lord of the Rings or even Spamalot, but is made easy to follow by both a clear English libretto but also the crystal diction of all the singers. You almost don’t need the surtitles. But it’s the presence of Sir John Tomlinson as the high priest Gurnemanz who acts as a sort of anchorman for the production which really blows you away. His is a fine voice at the absolute peak of his virtuosity, and in one of the longest and most arduous roles in opera he takes you with him every step of his emotional journey, and with a performance of this quality you’re proud and privileged to be at his side.

Then there’s the orchestra – the music has brass and woodwind-rich warmth in the Germanic tradition, and conductor Mark Wigglesworth conjures a mystic, ethereal sound: when you can feel the forest and the hunting horns in the music but see the icily grey scene, the contrast is spine tingling.

With a cast of over a hundred, the scenes with the Knights are cleverly choreographed and the stage feels filled with their numerous but strangely introverted presence.

This really is an other-worldly experience, and one which despite the five hours’ running time just flies by.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 18 Ferbruary 2011

Has Carmen Lost the Plot?

PUBLICATION DATE 12 APRIL 2012
Written for londonist.com



We have been here before. Many times, it feels: ‘stripped-down’ pub opera featuring the concomitant apparatus of skinny jeans, transfer tattoos, funky tights, DMs, bad haircuts, jazz beards and studentish ensembles. With its garret-full of debris, vodka bottles, cellphones, laptops and fairy lights, Carmen at the King’s Head does not disappoint.

The chaise-longue on which the eponymous heroine is eventually throttled could as easily be Mimi’s deathbed and we are disappointingly not a creative bus ride away from Opera UpClose’s original staging of La Bohème at the Cock Tavern which sparked the whole thing off in the first place.

London is now saturated with railway-arch and pub opera, and desperate for more of the originality which inspired the pioneering productions: at least this weekend’s opening of Don Giovanni in a gay bar under Charing Cross has promise of gender-bending and a recognisable baritone in the lead.

Critics agree the drama has been pared to the bone, but lost some rationality in the transfer to its North London crime-squat setting, as well as the fire and passion of Seville’s gypsy band. Rupert Christensen in the Telegraph gave it four stars, though, enjoying its “rough-edged vitality, mostly well-acted, crisply directed and inventively designed” in contrast to Kieron Quirke in the Evening Standard who thought it “short, and comically dreadful … a plotless try-hard mess”.

Ace opera bloggista Intermezzo picked on the “clunky English libretto, a bashed-up piano and an underutilised guitar” and we’d have to agree that you long for some orchestral support for the fabulous tunes in Bizet's lush and filmic score: although Elspeth Wilkes fairly hammered the pub piano into submission in a spirited accompaniment, Sam Johnson’s tentative guitar contributed little.

From a cheery start with the cast striking up the Habanera in the bar, the atmosphere’s charged with a convincing catfight and Carmen’s arrest by Don Jose but immediately deflated by a ten-minute wrangle to seat everyone inside the theatre itself.

Leads change nightly, but we enjoyed the chemistry between authentically Tufnell Park-born mezzo Flora McIntosh and East Sheen's hunky 'singing dentist' Andrew Bain as Jose, although he seemed to run out of both charisma and lung-power by the Flower Song climax.

Also, if you’re going to kill your girlfriend, hammering her face repeatedly into a canvas stage flat isn’t terribly efficient, as well as tension-breakingly laugh-out-loud funny.