Franco Milazzo - Page 9

Who’s up for a three-hour long opera about the relatively unknown pharaoh Akhnaten? With the singing in Egyptian, Hebrew and Akkadian? With no surtitles? Based on the music of minimalist composer Phillip Glass? And with an entire troupe of jugglers? Us, that's who.

With references ripped from the headlines, this rocket-paced update of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s Accidental Death Of An Anarchist is at once both deeply political and utterly hilarious.

If John Steinbeck had been asked to create a musical, it may have looked something like this. Soundtracked by the songs of Bob Dylan, Girl From The North Country is, at heart, a bleak meditation on untimely death; not just physically due to illness, murder and suicide (though that’s here too) but also spiritually due to the death of ambition, the death of hope and, most cruelly, the death of love.

Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City is undoubtably one of the biggest and most impressive shows in London, if only by sheer physical scale. Is it worth upgrading to their VIP experience?

When Coppelius asks Swanhilda “do you derive more pleasure from running your finger along your lover’s skin or across the glass surface of your phone?”, Coppélia holds a brutal mirror up to modern society in a way no ballet has for quite some time.

Featuring its ex-Principal Dancer Alessandra Ferri, the Royal Ballet revives its epic Woolf Works.

A year ago today, Russia began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Bunker Cabaret by Ukrainian theatre company Hooligan Art Community (HAC) will mark this sombre anniversary at Somerset House with shows tonight and tomorrow.

Despite the recent focus on metaverses and 3D gaming, digitally-rendered worlds – and the hype around them - have been in the public consciousness for decades.

Diana Nneka Atuona’s Liberian Girl was a hit at the Royal Court in 2015. In her second play, she shifts away from the African continent to 1940s Cardiff for her second play Trouble In Butetown.

Say what you like but little beats the thrill of live circus. Featuring motorcycles speeding around a Globe Of Death and incredible displays of acrobatics, balancing and knife-throwing plus one of the loveliest clowns in the business, Cirque Berserk returns to London for another run.

Jim Steinman's Bat Out Of Hell roars back into town so, over the sound of screeching motorcycles and teenage screams, we speak to star Sharon Sexton

That Leonard Cohen, one of the greatest modern troubadours, inspired such a disconnected dance show is possibly a testament to just how elusive his songs are.

Belgian dance company Peeping Tom verily put the 'trip' into Triptych, a brilliantly bizarre neo-noir dance trilogy full of deliciously dark delights.

Whether you see this because of the scintillating score or because a night at the opera is now cheaper than heating your home, The Barber Of Seville is sure to warm the cockles of your heart.

Jude Christian's visually stunning take on this goriest of stories from Shakespeare is bound to raise more than a few eyebrows. In a gender reversal of what likely took place on its first outing, this production has an all-female cast committing the heinous murders. The many, many deaths are portrayed by candles being snuffed out. This may be set in ancient Rome, but the dress code here is pyjamas and, in place of lyres and pan pipes, the music here consists mainly of darkly comic songs. A classic interpretation? Hardly

A party where no guests turns up. A punch bowl spiked with enough booze to get a mountain gorilla drunk. And a dancing carrot stick. Welcome to Bill's 44th birthday.

Quite why there aren’t more boundary-pushing, avant-garde, drag-slash-dance troupes around that appropriate film, TV and music to bring us satirically twisted versions of real-life and fictional historical figures, I really have no idea. So let’s treasure the ones that are around, eh?

Slashed, smashed, squished, shot, stabbed and splatted: these are only some of the ways that Canadian company The Old Trout Puppet Workshop kill off their creations in the pitch-black Famous Puppet Death Scenes, making its London premiere at The Barbican as part of this year's London International Mime Festival.

Part of this year’s London International Mime Festival, The Nature of Forgetting from Theatre Re dynamically tackles the topic of memory and what we do – and don’t – recall.

South African performance artist Jemma Kahn and her seven kamishibai stories both start off appearing quite ordinary before revealing remarkable levels of sex, violence and all manner of delightfully sordid behaviour.