Have you ever been assaulted by the stage lighting of a production? In the sixty-plus years since I saw my first play and opera (Carmen at the Cincinnati Zoo!), this is the first time I have felt physically threatened by a lighting designer, Mimi Jordan Sherin, who has lit Richard Jones's otherwise imaginative, rewarding revival of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, at the Royal Opera House, Covent … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2013
Better than Bayreuth?
The last "Ring" I saw was last autumn's revival of the Keith Warner production at Covent Garden. As in 2005/6 I had intended to write a book about seeing every Ring cycle produced in a single year, I not only saw the Bayreuth Ring in summer, 2006, but the earlier Manaus and Adelaide Rings. I've seen at least three different Bayreuth productions (each more than once) over the years, and have … [Read more...]
A Day in Valhalla
In a former henhouse, at Longborough, deep in the Cotswold countryside, a very ambitious Ring cycle is shaping up. What, I asked myself, would its bombastic, luxury-loving author and composer make of it? How would Wagner, who ordered his undergarments from a maker of bespoke women's lingerie, feel about designer Kjell Torriset's simple, effective, but hardly elegant costumes - … [Read more...]
Longborough’s golden D.I.Y. “Ring”
It's a far cry from the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney Hollywood movie where the two kids say "Let's put on a show," but the start of the 2013 Ring Cycle just outside the Cotswold village of Longborough has the same defiant D.I.Y. attitude. Martin and Lizzie Graham have been thinking about Wagner's operas for 30 years, and in 1998 they mounted - in a converted hen-house on their farm - their … [Read more...]