Canadian-born Mel Cooper came to the UK to study at Oxford and stayed, captivated by the culture and history of the welcoming and tolerant society of Britain.
He founded the magazine Opera Now. He was a consultant to the Japanese broadcaster NHK, a broadcaster on British Satellite Broadcasting and a member of the team that started Classic FM on which he broadcast shows like Classic America and Authentic Performance. After working with the Genesis Foundation on helping to fund arts projects, he continues to write, review and lecture on music and literature.
My first description of Nativity! The Musical, if I had to give a fifteen second elevator pitch, would be to say this: Monty Python meets St Trinian’s...
The material is not to everyone’s taste, so stay away if you hated the film. But interestingly, this was not an exact clone of the movie (though prett...
At one level I have nothing but good to report about the play Shakespeare in Love, adapted for the stage by Lee Hall from the screenplay by Marc Norma...
This is the kind of musical that restores my faith in light entertainment. It turns out to be a thoughtful story about the influence that pop music ha...
Troilus and Cressida is a late and difficult Shakespeare play that is considered by many to be extremely problematic. The new RSC production goes some...
Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was a huge, influential success when it first burst upon the stage; it is one of the seminal and also one of the gre...
The thing about the production of the new play called Tartuffe at the RSC is that it is really a play by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto who have created...
In our era in which politics has become egregiously dysfunctional, and in which so many politicians seem to have lost their altruism and simply to be ...
Ariadne auf Naxos is one of the most poetical, intellectual, and musically nuanced of operas, a sophisticate treat. Written by Hugo von Hoffmansthal a...
