Opera
Scottish Opera: The Pirates of Penzance, Festival Theatre, Review
The curtain rises and we see a squint map of that furthest end of Cornwall, and then a lone seagull flutters past soon to be followed by a fish.
Scottish Opera: The Flying Dutchman, Festival Theatre, Review
In 1839 Richard Wagner and his wife tried to evade their creditors in Riga by sailing away and eventually planning to reach Paris.
Edinburgh Studio Opera’s King Arthur, Canongate Kirk, Review
The performers had made their dramatic entrance when the evening’s director, the impressively voiced Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, was placing us way back to the early years of the reign of Dutch protestants
Edinburgh Fringe 2013
The Edinburgh International Festival may have come first, but generally it's the Fringe that Edinburgh is best-known for. There's really nothing quite like it - "the largest show on Earth".
The stats bear that out: the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe sees 42,096 performances of 2,695 shows in 279 Fringe venues. It's a sprawling, anarchic, sleepless month of live performances. There are also 814 free shows at the 2012 Fringe.
Scottish Opera: The Magic Flute, Festival Theatre, Review
This new production is set in the Victorian era and opens with a large and old-fashioned box camera pointing up at a man in one of the Festival Theatre’s four boxes.
Porgy & Bess, EFT, Review
High expectations were met and more. This all too short Edinburgh run consisting of 3 performances of ‘Porgy and Bess’ by Cape Town Opera was a theatrical treat not to be missed.
Scottish Opera: Tosca Review
The curtain rose and we were within the basilica church in Rome I used to walk past on my way from the Anglican Centre to meetings at the Vatican. The dark red interior stonework and a slightly lighter paving looked comforting, and the mildly dotty sactristan pottering about perfectly normal. And so the story of the political prisoner who has just escaped from Castel Sant’Angelo and his friend the painter developed. The choir and then the clergy process behind, the onlookers are asperged. All very real.
Scottish Opera: The Rake’s Progress Review
 and chorus in Scottish Opera's The Rake's Progress. Credit Mark Hamilton..thumbnail.jpg "Scottish Opera's The Rake's Progress")
Anne Trulove and Tom Rakewell are lovers but her father thinks Tom is a wastrel and finds a job for him in London. But he turns this down and is soon under the influence of a very convincing devil. He has the time of his life in bawdy eighteenth century London and there are great scenes of brothel life with a larger than life Mother Goose on her throne.