Canadian-born Mel Cooper first came to the UK to study English Literature at Oxford University and stayed. He was captivated by the culture and history of Britain, which he found to be a welcoming and tolerant country. After working in highly illustrated, non-fiction publishing for over a decade, he founded and edited the magazine Opera Now. Since then he has worked as a consultant to the Japanese broadcaster NHK, a broadcaster on British Satellite Broadcasting, a maker of audio shows and arts critic for several airlines, and as one of the team that started Britain’s first commercial classical music radio station, Classic FM, on which he was both a classical music DJ and creator and presenter of shows like Classic America and Authentic
Performance. Throughout this period, he also lectured in music and literature in London and Oxford and published short stories in Canada. After working with the Genesis Foundation on helping to fund arts projects, he continues to write, review and lecture on music and literature. His first novel has just been published as an e-book. The title is City of Dreams. It is the first volume of a projected saga called The Dream Bearers. You can find the Kindle version of the book on Amazon.
Joseph Heller’s own script for a theatrical version of his large 1961 novel, Catch-22, is evocatively set more or less in the guts of a WWII airplane....
Konchalovsky is not only a legendary film-maker but, on the evidence of his productions now in London, a great theatre director. The two productions o...
After the wonderful, rich production and interpretation of Richard II by the Royal Shakespeare Company, I was hugely looking forward to Henry IV, Part...
I guess people turn famous films into plays because of name recognition and thinking they will be a magnet for audiences and therefore make back their...
If you have any interest at all in contemporary dance, try not to miss Ballet Rambert wherever and whenever it appears near you. One of the oldest and...
This new production of one of the central Handel operas has had unstinted praise from every quarter, as far as I can tell. I find that I can stint a l...
Ghost: The Musical is an exemplar of a trend to turn well-known titles into staged versions and add singing and dancing. The problem is that, unlike t...
For the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of WWI, and the fiftieth of Joan Littlewood’s creative, inventive musical entertainment, the adventurous The...
What can I say? I went to this musical with very low expectations – the prospect of a show built around a collection of hit songs of the 1960s strung ...
