Glasgow's West End Festival is planning a spectacular finale on Sunday June 7 when up to a dozen street bands, samba groups and carnival music troupes from across the UK will join over 500 costumed performers for West End Festival's Mardi Gras Parade.
In addition to the performers already invited the festival is seeking horn players, particularly sousaphone players, to make an extra big noise and possibly break the record for the most sousaphones ever to play in one band in Scotland. The current record - ten - was set in Edinburgh in 2013 and organisers are hoping to go at least one better. Details are available from Oi Musica.
oimusica.co.uk
Sir Michael Boyd, pictured, directs the next production in London's Soho Theatre's Political Party season, a new translation, by Sasha Dugdale, of a contemporary Russian play, The Harvest.
Boyd, for a decade the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeared Company and before that in charge of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, has a particular affinity for Russian drama, having trained there. Pavel Pryazhko's critique of autocratic leadership is set on a commercial orchard, where Egor, Valerii, Ira and Lyuba are picking and packing apples. As the day progresses, tiny problems escalate into an utter shambles and comic mayhem an an allegory of the social pecking order in Russian society. Pryazhko has a cult following in Moscow for his merciless depictions of post-Soviet life and his plays are also popular in Belarus and Ukraine.
The Harvest opens on May 21 and runs to June 20.
sohotheatre.com
The documentary Written by Mrs Bach, written by Robert Beedham and directed by Alex McCall for Glasgow Films won a Gold Medal in the Arts category National Association of Broadcasters of America's awards in Las Vegas last week.
The film, which is narrated by composer Sally Beamish, posits that some of Johann Sebastian Bach's most famous works may be attributable to his second wife, Anna Magdalena. It is based on a book by Australian forensic musicologist Professor Martin Jarvis, whose work is corroborated in the documentary by Heidi Harralson of East Tennessee University, a leading forensic document analyst in the US. Ms Harralson collected the medal, which follows an award for excellence for the film at California's Indiefest, on behalf of the Scottish company.
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