AFICIONADOS of opera and fans of musicals will get a chance to mingle
and compare notes both high and low next week at Glasgow Royal Concert
Hall, when Opera in Concert, the London-based production company,
present a concert version of West Side Story on May 26. This means in
effect that the boring bits, like the dancing and the sets, have been
removed, allowing you to concentrate on the wonderfully exhilarating
music and the timeless songs.
The music will be played by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, all
80-odd of them (some of them very odd indeed) and the soloists will be
Aussie soprano Amanda Thane, who will be singing the role of Maria, and
Christopher Ventris, who will be singing Tony. Both of these come
trailing clouds of glory and outstanding reviews, and Ventris has just
had a huge success in the Royal Opera's Katya Kabanova at Covent Garden.
Another Antipodean soprano, Dame Kiri te Kanawa, popularised (or
should that be elitised?) the Bernstein masterwork when she recorded it
in the eighties with Jose Carreras and Bernstein conducting. There has
been a bit of purist muttering about dragging songs and arias raw and
bleeding from their various settings but the concert which this company
put on at the Concert Hall last year was an outstanding success, and it
had Michael Tumelty, Lord High Tum-te-Tum himself, absolutely
rhapsodising.
As well as Tonight, Maria, I Feel Pretty, Somewhere and the rest,
there will be songs from Gershwin's An American in Paris and the
incomporable Porgy and Bess.''
Altogether now ''Summertime, and the livin's is e-e-easy''.
Mayfest finishes tomorrow but you can still see and enjoy the totally
terrific Dumbstruck at the Tron until Sunday. Take incontinence pads and
a plastic bag because if you don't wet yourself laughing you'll guffaw
yourself sick.
The ensemble playing is exquisite and it would be desperately unfair
to single out one actor from this perfectly blended production, so
naturally I'm going to.
If you see a better-paced and funnier performance than the one Jimmy
Chisholm delivers then you will be a lucky theatregoer indeed. He walks
the tightrope of OTT temptation with an aplomb Blondine would have
envied, teettering tantalisingly on the edge of parody without ever
falling over. Director Michael Boyd is to be congratuled on assembling
this manic crew.
It has been my Mayfest highlight so far but if you were to stick
around the Tron after the show tonight and tomorrow you might experience
at 10.45pm Virtual Reality, a savagely comic attack on the politically
correct, among many others, which doesn't take any prisoners.
It stars, apart from the above mentioned J Chisholm, the sublime Andy
Gray, who is to over-the-topness what Hoover is to vacuum cleaners
(eponymous, a big sook and not so dusty) and also Billy McIlhaney, High
Thespe of the East and Hibee extraordinaire.
The gallus and glamorous Barbara Rafferty supplies the distaff humour
from this week's headlines and these are people not to be trifled with,
unless you want a metaphorical custard pie in the face.
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