So I was happily driving along the M40 on my way to see Romeo and Juliet in Stratford-upon-Avon when the blow-out happened. Bang. Rear wheel scraping along the road at 70mph. Smoke rising. Lorries looming. Headlights flashing.

Good grief, I thought (I think): I get quite enough excitement at the theatre without this sort of stuff happening. And I was stuck in the middle lane and really quite enjoying Steve Wright in the afternoon on BBC Radio 2.

Luckily the lorry brigade slowed down around me, I got onto the verge — this was about two miles beyond Oxford — rang the insurance people and waited for the call-out van.

This is where the good news started. A friendly posse of traffic police called by to make sure I was okay; well, I was shaking a bit and stuffing my face with more liquorice all sorts than was probably good for me.

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The over-age Romeo and Juliet at the Bristol old Vic, re-imagined as Juliet and Her Romeo in an old folks’ home by Tom Morris and Sean O’Connor, marks the true beginning of the new regime in King Street and the old place was buzzing last night.

Deputy chairman Patrick Malahide said it all when he simply stood there glowing with pleasure, while Stephanie Cole, Gemma Jones and Brigit Forsyth swapped memories and stories in the foyer and ebullient local vintner John Avery happily sipped the champagne that he hadn’t supplied.  
 
Tom Morris took a few of us up on the stage before the house opened, and even a critic could see that to act on this stage  — which has had its Georgian thrust renewed — must be an absolute joy.

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Janaceck’s great lyric opera Katya Kabanova — adapted by the composer himself from Ostrovsky’s The Storm — returned to the Coliseum last night in a superb, stark production by David Alden, and with accompanying programme notes by no less than two former ENO general directors, surely a record.

Dennis Marks, who was in the hot seat from 1993 to 1997 (and whose niece, Nancy Groves, is our off-West End deputy editor), writes illuminatingly about the influence of Janacek’s muse and platonic lover Kamila Stosslova on the opera, while his successor, Nicholas Payne, rounds up his favourite revivals of the piece.

I’ve seen the opera several times and am never less than astonished by it. The effect of the music — insinuating, insidious, coiled, complex and emotionally charged — is to pin you to your seat then tear you to pieces.

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I participated in a conference titled “Shakespeare and the City” in Paris over the weekend in which scholars mulled over aspects of the bard without too much direct reference to anything going on in the theatre today.

An exception was a paper documenting some Shakespeare in the city streets from Regents Park to Central Park in New York, a fringe Macbeth in Edinburgh, Bubble’s Pericles in 2002 and a Merchant of Venice in Cork.
  
As the Globe has confirmed, hearing Shakespeare in the open air creates a quite different experience, and the word “frottement” was a charming evocation of the physical, perhaps even sexual, interaction between play and spectators en plein air.

But sometimes the purely academic approach to Shakespeare and his contemporaries can be as revealing as it can be entertaining.

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Ibsen plays are never easy going but are always worth seeing which is why we were glad to take a group of over 120 Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers to Ghosts at the Duchess Theatre last night. A play about a the affect of the past on the present and one woman’s real pain in the face of decisions long since made this is heavy content and we were so pleased that Iain Glen and Lesley Sharp could join us, after such difficult performances, for a really interesting Q&A.

The five strong cast all put in truly moving performances, particularly Harry Treadaway who plays Oswlad Alving the son of Mrs Alving (skillfully played by Lesley Sharp). All taking place over the course of sixteen hours, years of repression and pain are allowed out on to the stage with shattering consequences. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long and bumpy road but the Phantom finally rode again last night and any fears of a let-down were obliterated in the superb, sensational new show at the Adelphi.

Lloyd Webber has certainly matched the quality of the first Phantom score and my deep fears about the absence of producer Cameron Mackintosh, director Hal Prince and designer Maria Bjornson — not to mention the supreme stellar performance of Michael Crawford — are totally confounded.

Mysteries remain, though. Lyricist Glenn Slater never showed at the Press launch, nor did he join the composer and director Jack O’Brien to take a bow at the opening last night.

He’s obviously a phantom lyricist, sulking in his tent like Achilles and planning to take the field when his own work isn’t upstaged by a genius musician.

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High drama at the ENO for Jonathan Miller’s brilliant revival of Donizetti’s wholly delightful The Elixir of Love on Friday night: the leading tenor was off, so was his understudy.

A moth-eaten looking casting director appeared to say that another of the lead singers was on the point of collapse.
 
Some of the aged audience looked as though they might not make it past the interval.

I was still in  a state of semi-shock from my Ridgeback encounter on the heath. What was needed was not an elixir but wholesale medical treatment, if not a miracle or two.

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I was forcefully embraced and given a good licking on the heath this morning, but not by anyone I knew.

The unwanted slobberer was a muzzled Ridgeback as big as a horse who responded to my gesticulations by climbing onto my shoulders and whispering sweet nothings in my ear.

“He’s only being friendly,” shouted his walker, or minder, aka Claudia “Egypt” Boulton, the poshest hippie I know and formerly of Beryl and the Perils, who sang feminist songs of sex and masturbation in the early days of the fringe. 

Why was I gesticulating in the first place? Because I wanted to say hello — I haven’t given Claudia a bad review lately — and I look pretty silly, as well as unrecognisable, in my shades and luminous yellow woolly top on such glorious, cold sunny mornings as today’s.

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Everyone I know seeems to have seen Love Never Dies already, and comment on the score is flowing freely through the newspapers and on the blogosphere.

Critics have listened to the score and the Press previews are starting on Saturday.

So once again the whole idea of a First Night next Tuesday is a wash-out. And the peculiar thrill of being able to say “I was there” when the show opened is blown away on the wind.

I know from reliable colleagues like Baz Bamigboye and Edward Seckerson that the new score is a peach, Well, I know it for myself and, without preempting later critical comment, I am intensely looking forward to hearing “live” the eerie dissonance of the song the Phantom can’t express until, ten years after they parted, he hears Christine sing again.

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Another unfunny thing happened on my way to the Orange Tree on Friday night: I couldn’t, as usual, find a copy of the Evening Standard.

But in a casual conversation with one of my three newsagents in the Gospel Oak area, I learned that the re-launched “free paper” is not necessarily so.

My man behind the sweet counter tells me that “they” (the Standard distribution people, or some cartel representing them ) said they would deliver copies to him if he could guarantee selling twenty every afternoon for twenty pence each.

Such a sale would yield, over five days, a weekly amount of £20, £9 of which they would pay to him. He told them to forget it.
One wonders if and where these bizarre sales practices are in force elsewhere in the capital.

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