In its new, deliciously naughty adaptation, RC Theatre has gone to town in shaking up Mozart’s opera, subverting genders of everyone but the Don himself and supplanting Giovanni’s Spain with a strobe-lit London of the late eighties. Stepping over the dance floor of Embankment’s Heaven nightclub, audience members crowd into a tinsel-town of strip joints [...]

This being my first opera, I entered the Hackney Empire feeling somewhat apprehensive, but fortunately I was worrying over nothing. Not only is this production of Eugene Onegin for English Touring Opera surtitled and in English, but also it is as relevant today as it was when it was first performed in 1879, as it [...]

Before Count Almaviva became a baritone and a lecher, he was a tenor and bit of a stalker. As Rossini’s The Barber of Seville is an operatic adaptation of the first play in Beaumarchais’s Figaro trilogy, it’s hard not to make comparisons with Mozart’s version of its continuation, The Marriage of Figaro, which came 30 [...]

Gilbert and Sullivan had a particular knack for choosing pertinent subjects, and exposing their absurdities with wit and style that could be interpreted as either satire or celebration of the fun that can be had. The Aesthetic movement was all the rage in the later part of the nineteenth century and influenced a wealth of [...]