On Wednesday, in the company of an enthusiastic and very large audience at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre, I caught up with Scottish Ballet's rebooting of Matthew Bourne's Highland Fling, an exceedingly contemporary take on La Sylphide which those who had seen it at Glasgow's Theatre Royal insisted I must not miss.
It may begin with a growl and a roar in a frosted-glass fronted cube, but by the time writer/performer Angela Clerkin and director Lee Simpson's quasi-autobiographical study of barely-repressed anger is completed some 80 minutes later, something even less cuddly has emerged.
Can it really be 23 years since Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze made pottery the most sensual thing about 1990 – and Whoopi Goldberg victoriously left the Academy Awards with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar?
What would happen if the revolution became reduced to a series of letterwriting parties that gathered the converted together under the guidance of the sort of perma- grinning cheerleader normally the preserve of high street charity muggers?
Most choreographers meet the challenge of making a new piece by heading into the studio and working through their ideas with the dancers – usually against the unwelcome pressure of a deadline.
Judging from the well sold house and thoroughly enthusiastic reception at the first night, this new production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance looks set to be a success for Scottish Opera.
Stuart Hepburn's bio-play about legendary Italian road racing cyclist Marco Pantani couldn't be more timely, what with the Giro d'Italia, which Pantani won as well as the Tour de France in 1998, currently underway.
19 May 2013
