Tag Archives: Opera House

Review – Something Rotten! Opera House, Manchester, 2nd July 2026

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Something Rotten!Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell’s Something Rotten! has taken eleven years from opening on Broadway to receiving its UK premiere. In that time, it’s enjoyed a two-year US tour, and had productions in Sweden, Austria, South Korea, Canada, and the Czech Republic. Why has it taken so long to hit Britain? Could it be because it is, in fact, a bit rotten?

No! Not a bit of it. Something Rotten! is one of the funniest, freshest, catchiest, most uplifting new musicals I’ve seen in ages. For a brand new show (new to the UK anyway) it feels surprisingly traditional – but for all the best reasons. Instantly captivating, it reminded me whilst watching the opening sequence of so many of those memorable, ambitious musicals of the 60s and 70s; big set, big cast, big band and big on entertainment. For the first time in years, I left the theatre after seeing a new musical with the songs still in my head – that’s such a rarity nowadays.

It’s 1595 and Shakespeare is ruling London’s theatrical roost. Meanwhile brothers and wannabe playwrights Nick and Nigel Bottom are down on their uppers, disappointing their patron, Lady Croydon, and coming up with ideas that Shakespeare always seems to have got to first. Using what little household savings he and his wife Bea have amassed, Nick employs the services of a soothsayer, Nostradamus – not the Nostradamus, but his nephew Thomas – who looks into the future and predicts that the theatre of tomorrow will be… musicals. Trouble is, no one has heard of them yet, so Nick has a job ahead of him convincing his players and Lady Croydon of this bizarre mix of plot and song. Nostradamus also predicts what will be Shakespeare’s biggest success, so that Nick can nick it first; and he’s so close to getting the title right – but not quite.

On one level, Something Rotten! tells this merry tale of the Bottoms and their struggle to out-Shakespeare Shakespeare. On another, it’s quite the most inventive love letter to theatre in general, and musicals in particular. It makes you wonder who the first person was to think of trying out this new stage format – and to admire and thank them for their innovation. There is a song in the show simply called A Musical, which doffs its cap to so many well-known musical shows, with dozens of hilarious references that make a musical theatre fan guffaw with pleasure.

But Something Rotten! is no mere parody. Nearly all the songs are individual works of genius that either move the story on or enhance our understanding of the characters, and there isn’t a wasted moment in the entire two and a half hours. This is a show that’s determined to give its audience a good time, and it delivers it in spades. The characterisations are hilarious, from the theatre fan Shylock to the secretly theatrical puritan Brother Jeremiah. from the over-the-top Nostradamus to the nauseatingly vain Shakespeare, there’s so much on stage that keeps you laughing and engaged all the way through.

Colin Richmond’s set gives an authentic sense of rickety old London and Rebecca Brower’s costumes are perfectly in keeping with the Elizabeth age, both the rich dandies and the poor downtrodden. Danny Belton’s eight-piece band produce a full, rich, showbizzy accompaniment to the witty songs, and the cast are uniformly excellent, with a hard-working and super-talented troupe and ensemble giving tremendous support throughout.

Gareth Davies gives a surprisingly upbeat portrayal of Shylock, who hopes he might play the happy good-natured Jew in Bottom’s next play. Elliotte Williams-N’Dure plays the delightfully larger-than-life Lady Croydon, hard to please but besotted, like everyone, with Bottom’s big rival. Cory English gives a fantastically energetic and madcap portrayal of Nostradamus, prancing athletically around the stage in the big musical numbers. Cassius Hackforth makes a wonderful contrast with the other characters with his thoughtful characterisation of Nigel, uncertain of his own skills, and hardly daring to fall in love with the excellent Portia, played by Carla Dixon-Hernandez, the poetry-mad daughter of Paul Ryan’s hypocrite Brother Jeremiah, portentously warning against the pleasures of the flesh whilst making endless Freudian slips revealing his true nature.

Curtain CallMarisha Wallace continues to knock every role she takes out of the park, with her lively, endearing and spirited performance as Bea, Nick’s long-suffering but immensely practical and forgiving wife. Her rendition of Right Hand Man is one of the true highlights of the first Act, and she lights up the stage whenever she is on. Equally powerful and impressive is a tour de force by Richard Fleeshman as the big-headed Shakespeare, portraying him as a celebrity superstar, tossing out bon-mots for all his devoted fans to gobble up. Imagine Blackadder’s Lord Flashheart as the bard and you’re part-way there. And of course, one of Manchester’s favourite sons, Jason Manford, appears as Nick Bottom, anchoring the show in his inimitable style, delivering the comedy and music with sure-footed aplomb.

It isn’t a show that makes any serious points about the human condition, but it does celebrate everything that makes us happy. And in these difficult days that’s definitely something worth making a song and dance about. Something Rotten! continues at the Manchester Opera House until 19th July – but surely it must have a life hereafter.

Five Alive, Let Theatre Thrive!

Review – The Take That Experience, Buxton Opera House, 9th September 2021

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I’ll be honest with you, gentle reader, the main reason I booked to see The Take That Experience on the last night of our week’s holiday in the Peak District was finally to take a peek inside the Buxton Opera House, a building I’ve known about for decades but never seen a show there. And I have to say it’s quite a curious place. The lavish gilt decoration inside Frank Matcham’s 1903 building, as it drapes itself around the proscenium arch and the balconies and galleries, gleams beautifully with true wedding-cake magnificence, full of luxury and grandeur. The flooring, however, as you make your way to your Stalls seats, is a dull grey lino, and the Stalls Bar has all the comfort and style of a 1960s urinal. If more than three people are waiting at the bar, the queue reaches outside and gets mingled with the queue waiting to go into the Ladies’ loo, so do be careful with your orienteering skills. So, something of a mismatch, but I’m glad I’ve now chalked it off my list of Theatres I Haven’t Visited Yet.

We’re quite partial to a spot of Take That; Mrs Chrisparkle, in particular, has been a bit of a secret fan since the early 90s. In fact, there’s no secret about it at all. The story that she was once heard shouting out I Love You Jason! may or may not be apocryphal, and may or may not have taken place at a Take That concert. In recent years we’ve seen Never Forget, which, try as we might, we never will, The Band, which was surprisingly superb, and the lads themselves at Milton Keynes. But we’d never before seen a straightforward, honest to its boots, tribute act.

It does me no credit when I confess that I didn’t have much in the way of expectation for this show. But – guess what? – The Take That Experience does exactly what it says on the tin, providing two hours of high energy, top commitment and super skilful performance that had the pensioners of Buxton (and ourselves) on our dancing feet from the earliest possible opportunity. The show opens with “Gary”, “Mark” and “Howard” doing a few, mainly more recent, numbers, including a song that has recently become a favourite of mine, These Days, and a terrific performance of Shine fronted by “Mark”.Then we met “Robbie”, who, of all the performers, is perhaps the least physically like his famous counterpart but makes up for it with a magnetic personality, terrific rapport with the audience, and a very athletic and bouncy performance style. “Robbie” sang us a few of his solo songs; and then, after the interval, we went back in time to the original five-guy-group (welcome on stage scream “Jason”) for a thoroughly entertaining retrospective concert of all their greatest hits – every one an instantly recognisable winner.

It certainly delivered a lot more than it promised, and we had a terrific time. If you love your Thats, you’re going to love this bunch. They’re on an extensive tour of the UK until the end of the year and I thoroughly recommend them!

4-starsFour they’re jolly good fellows!

Lockdown Armchair Travel – Australia – Sydney in 1985

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The first of my armchair reminiscences of travel in the pre-Covid times featured A is for Argentina and Buenos Aires. Next up, A is also for Australia, a country I’ve been lucky enough to visit four times. The first time was in July 1985, with a stopover in Singapore, followed by two weeks in Sydney and a few days on the way home in Perth. Personally significant, you might say, as it was on this trip that I first encountered the young Miss Duncansby who would later become Mrs Chrisparkle!

Anyway, here’s a few sights of Sydney 35 years ago.

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That’s Sydney’s most iconic sight – taken from the ferry.

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Nuns in a scrum was how it was described to me. I can see what they mean.

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It can also provide the perfect backdrop for a moody male model shot.

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All Sydney’s major sights are within a stone’s throw of each other, because it really is a city based on the water. The Harbour Bridge looks dramatic from any angle.

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Here’s Mrs Macquarie’s Chair – a rocky outcrop near the Opera House carved into a chair by convicts so that Mrs Macquarie could watch the ships go by in relative comfort. All right for some, isn’t it.

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Another of my favourite places on that trip was Taronga Park Zoo. The contrast between the zoo animals and the backdrop of the Sydney Cityscape is, in zoo terms, pretty hard to beat.

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Even without animals, the view is breathtaking.

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I was rather taken with its front entrance too.

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Today, Sydney is a very modern, rat-racey city, but in 1985 it had a charming built-in sleepiness. Even though the horizon is full of skyscrapers, you never felt far away from somewhere restful.

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Here’s St Mary’s Cathedral from a jaunty angle.

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And the heart of Sydney’s heritage district, The Rocks.

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And finally, an out-of-town shot. Here’s Wattamolla, in the Royal National Park, a stunningly beautiful lagoon which I also got to visit thirty years later!

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There you go, a little taster of what Sydney looked like 35 years ago. Tomorrow it’s back to reminiscing about old shows – from 1971 and 1972. See you then!

Review – Sleeping Beauty, The Australian Ballet, Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 16th December 2015

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It was fifteen years ago that Mrs Chrisparkle and I last went to the Sydney Opera House. We were in Australia to celebrate the marriage of her brother, Lord Leumeah, to the Countess of Camden. One evening, whilst they were enjoying their nuptials, we snuck off to the Opera House and saw the Australian Ballet perform The Merry Widow, and damn fine they were too. Fifteen years on, we found ourselves once again in a land down under, and, joined by my Lord and the Countess, now accompanied by their daughter and heir, the little Marchioness of Minto, we took the opportunity to return to the stunning setting of the Opera House – this time to see the Australian Ballet take on Tchaikovsky’s 1890 hit, The Sleeping Beauty.

If you’ve been to the Opera House before, you know that one of the things you can do to make your evening extra special is book dinner in the Bennelong Restaurant, the fine-dining establishment that nestles at the front of the theatre, basically housed underneath the first nun in the scrum, if that’s how you characterise the building. The five of us enjoyed its pre-theatre sumptuousness, including a rather delectable McLaren Vale Somerled Shiraz, served in an elegant decanter. I had the carrot salad, roast lamb and the pine-lime, all of which tasted much more spectacular than they sound. They did however let themselves down by refusing to mix and match two items from the children’s menu onto the same plate. The Marchioness, like many a six-year-old, is quite a fussy eater. “The chef isn’t prepared to do it”, our waiter informed us. Pity. As a result, I wasn’t prepared to tip as generously as I normally would.

But what of the show? This is one of those grand productions that has been formulating in the back of someone’s head for decades. The someone in question is David McAllister, Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet, who’s worked with the company, man and boy, on and off since 1983. Somewhat extraordinarily, this is the first full length work that he has choreographed for the company – in combination with the traditions of Petipa, of course. In the programme he explains that if he had commissioned anyone else to choreograph it, he would have been constantly interrupting and seeking changes, so clear is his vision for exactly how this work should look. So he had no choice but to do it himself. The production started in Melbourne, moved on to Perth, and finally had a three-week sell-out residency at the Sydney Opera House, closing on 16th December, which, as luck would have it, was the date on which we saw it.

Considering Australia is an innovative, “new” country, it’s maybe a surprise, but you can’t get more traditional than the Australian Ballet. They employ every classical trick in the book to keep alive the old performance traditions of Russian ballet down under: elaborate curtain calls, gentlemanly hand-waving any time a prima ballerina comes within a five feet radius of an inactive member of the corps de ballet, prolonged sequences of mime whenever they need to expand on plot development (a frown and two crossing hands means “no”; pointedly tugging at your ring finger means “I want to marry your daughter/princess/swan/nymph”.

But they carry it off spectacularly well. A full, resonant orchestra rings out Tchaikovsky’s great tunes under the baton of Nicolette Fraillon (who at a distance looks alarmingly like Nicola Sturgeon). Simply magnificent sets and costumes by Gabriela Tylesova, where no extravagance is ever considered an extravagance too far, grace the stage. The set even gets its own round of applause at the beginning of Act Three.

And then there is the dancing, of course. For the most part, it’s exquisitely beautiful. In our performance, Princess Aurora was danced by Benedicte Bemet, a coryphée, and she’s certainly going places. It’s a demanding role and she danced with skill, grace and beauty throughout. Her Désiré was Kevin Jackson, one of the company’s Principal Artists, and he invested the role with great character and athleticism, really bringing the house down in his third act pas de deux. But for me the star of this show was Amber Scott, another Principal Artist, dancing the role of the Lilac Fairy. Elegance just radiates from her. I doubt she could open a tin of peas without doing it gorgeously. She’s just one of those dancers you just can’t take your eyes off. I was also really impressed with the pas de deux by Chengwu Guo and Ako Kondo as Bluebird and the Princess Florine. The five fairies who dominate the prologue were also danced with enormous grace and beauty. From my vantage point in the circle I couldn’t quite identify who was dancing which role – but I particularly liked the dancer in ice blue and the one in dark red. Another was dressed in flamingo pink and green, and when she whizzed around, she looked like a watermelon in the blender.

The Sleeping Beauty Waltz is, naturally, a highlight; danced, traditionally, with floral garlands, and I must say it was a stunning sight: beautiful control, sheer elegance. Our mean and nasty Carabosse was danced by Gillian Revie, a guest artist whom I remember from her appearances in the Royal Ballet in the 1990s. The dancers who surrounded her costumed as rats gave great support, but my only criticism of the dancing would be concerning some members of the corps de ballet. The girls were great, but some of the guys were rather heavy on the crash landings from time to time – I know, I’m very demanding. Watching the entire ballet, you realise that the drama comes to an end all too soon with the conclusion of Act Two;Act Three is just an excuse for celebratory dancing for Aurora’s Wedding. This gives the ballet as a whole a slightly unbalanced feel – and with two twenty-minute-plus intervals, the show stretches out to almost three hours, which is a lot for a six-year-old Marchioness to take, not to mention two British tourists suffering from jetlag. But it really was a stunningly beautiful production, and the Opera House audience went wild with appreciation.

As implied earlier, the wine selection at the Bennelong Restaurant is pretty damn amazing. Buoyed up with confidence, I ordered a couple of glasses of fizz for the second interval from the circle bar. Oh dear. Any memories of the lavish, elegant fruit notes that might have lingered from our dinnertime Shiraz were eradicated by that glass of paint stripper. Lord Leumeah had a glass of white. Grudgingly, he described it as adequate, by which I interpreted that it was far from adequate. How very odd that the Opera House puts its inestimable name and splendid reputation to such lousy house wines?