Alexander Cohen

Juggle like an Egpytian: 'Akhnaten' review ★★★★★ This really is the kind of production you to take photos of and frame on your wall. Majestic […]

I Don't Want Realism: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' Review ★★★★✰ It starts with a cacophony of drums, the hustle and bustle of New Orleans throbbing in the summer he […]

★★★✰✰

Still going strong after almost twenty years, David McVicar’s multifaceted production serves up a delicious dream of celestial imagery accentuated with enlightenment philosophy, tongue-in-c […]

★★✰✰✰

Do Ludwig Wittgenstein and Andy Warhol have much in common besides being considered iconoclastic in their respective fields and having surnames that start with the same letter? Martin Crimp seems to […]

★★★✰✰

Believe it or not, The Almeida’s Tammy Faye is not the first musical based on the life of the American televangelist. It is easy to see why: the larger-than-life Christian TV host was practically […]

★★★★✰

Swirling romances, alcohol drenched soirées, and outrageous outfits. Pearl Cleage’s 1995 Blues for an Alabama Sky paints a lively picture of the emotional ebbs and flows of 1930s Harlem. Lynette Lint […]

★★★✰✰

Richard Jones’ 2017 production of Puccini’s La bohème is a lesson in how less can be more. The effortless design achieves so much with so little; something as small as a precarious plume of smoke from […]

★★★✰✰

The stage is cloaked in an oppressive darkness. Actors hover in from upstage like phantoms. A shivering portentous feeling pervades the Olivier stage throughout The Crucible. It’s not just the sense o […]

★★★✰✰

In theory, Tosca is a safe bet to start a new season. It has the DNA of a classic opera: lustful love triangles, macabre murder, and snappy melodrama. But even the safest bets carry risk, and the ENO’s […]

Dynamic and kaleidoscopic, it is no wonder why director Kasper Holten’s Don Giovanni has been revived so many times. It juggles deftly comedy, tragedy, and even horror ensuring a concrete, albeit safe, start to t […]

★★★✰✰

Dirt lines the walls of a dingy basement room. Fragments of a decadent dinner party play out in the room above. Who knows what grotesque plans are being hatched among the tuxedo clad guests? All the a […]

Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon star as lovers whose relationship disintegrates when their pasts return from the depths of memory to haunt them in Claire Denis’ Both Sides of the […]

★★★★✰

A summer getaway on stage, Simon Godwin’s Much Ado about Nothing blazes with sultry Latin flare. Set in the Hotel Messina, it is an ice-cold cocktail of comedy, sumptuous performances, and all the lux […]

Recently starring opposite Alfred Enoch in Romeo and Juliet at the Globe, Sirine Saba has a strong background in Shakespeare. She has over twenty years of experience performing on the hallowed stages of the […]

★★✰✰✰

They say comedy is about timing. Well, here is a comedy that is fifty years out of date.

Based on Sheridan’s The Rivals, Jack Absolute Flies Again has a lot in common with another comedy of manners […]

★★★✰✰

Verdi’s lifelong passion for the Bard filtered through to much of his work. He wrote direct operatic translations of Shakespeare’s plays (Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff) and sometimes he borrowed plot […]

★★★★✰

Some combinations just work. Wine and cheese. Torvil and Dean. Cavalleria Rustica and Pagliacci.

Pietro Mascagni’s 1890 Cavalleria Rustica, and Pietro Mascagni’s 1892 Pagliacci have been performed tog […]

A new 4K remaster of Wim Wenders’ melancholic masterpiece finds beauty in a broken Berlin.

Imagine for a few moments that you are living in West Berlin. From the ground, the Berlin Wall’s silent terror is […]

★★✰✰✰

In 1997 Kathryn Hunter made history becoming the first woman to play King Lear in a professional production. What has changed since? For one thing, women playing men on stage is more commonpla […]

★★✰✰✰

Nobody will deny that Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is a product of its time for many reasons. But directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Cauriers’ production that returns to the Royal Opera House, is als […]