... PUTTING on a 35-year-old musical must always be a tricky business, but the reception given at the Forum, Billingham, on Tuesday at the opening night of Me and My Girl was almost rapturous and came from a full house of agea people. Its appeal was not purely nostalgic for it had many good musical numbers of which Me and My Girl and The Lambeth Walk were only two. Jimmy Thompson was sur- ...

... Russian partnership THE PARTNERSHIP of the two ex-Soviet dancers, Natalia Makarova and Rudolf Nureyev, was a guaranteed house-filler for the Royal Ballet's Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden on June 8 and the packed audience was not disappointed with the resulting performance. Both dancers have magnetism, though of quite different quality, and Nureyev's intensity was concentrated in showing ...

... CONSIDERING that men have been making beautiful sounds, graceful movements and gorgeous artefacts to the greater glory of God since the begin ning of recorded time, last week's 'festival of new forms of worship in London. That's the Spirit, seems to have attracted an unfair chorus of bleats from various ecclesiastical establish ments. A number of professional theatre people have taken part, so ...

... ARTS 'MARILYN' MORE a mimed play than a ballet, Adam Darius's Marilyn at the Arts on February 6 attempts to show the essence of Marilyn Monroe's almost legendary attraction and the events leading to her death. In company with the writer Robert F. Slatzen, he feels that the film actress was murdered and made to look like suicide. The girl who plays her, Tessa Bill-Yeald, is astonishingly like ...

... ROUND HOUSE RED BUDDHA POP MUSIC-THEATRE finds its most exuberant--and noisiest--expression in the productions by the Red Buddha Theatre and their latest, Raindog, at the Round House on February 6, is as all-embracing and aggressive as ever. The story of a drought-ridden village and the tragedies which occur before rain is sent to them, is played out on a central circu lar stage and uses ...

... At the Prom NO ONE could level the frequent charge that ballet music is all right to see, but not to hear without action, at the all-Stravinsky programme con ducted by Pierre Boulez. This Promenade concert vibrated with excitement from the an gularities of Agon to the last piece, Le Sacre du Prin- temps. This produced from the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing in which you could smell the blood ...

... Orfeo KENT OPERA KENT OPERA staged their highly regarded production (by Jonathan Miller, no less) of Monteverdi's Orfeo at the Collegiate on March 21 as part of the Camden Festival, showing how well opera can be staged with slender resources. Dr Miller sees the paintings of Nicolas Poussin as standing in an interesting relationship to Monte verdi's music, so has used four canvasses painted ...

... Sadler's Wells Contemporary TWO new short pieces were featured in London Contemporary Dance Theatre's programme at Sadler's Wells on November 17, the more effective being Micha Bergese's Da Capo al Fine. The musical term used for the title gives a certain amount of shape to the work, though not in as formal a sense as. say, a Handel aria, though it has a contrasting central section and a ...

... The Seraglio KENT OPERA GOYA and the effects ot painters from an earlier age such as Caravaggio appear to be the visual influence on Kent Opera's newest and most elaborate production--Mozart's The Seraglio newly translated by Michael Irwin and directed bv Eliiah Moshinsky. Deirdre Clancy designed the scenery and costumes and Nick Chelton created the lighting. The conductor for the proper ...

... Opened September 2 IT IS certainly good to see the Windmill restored to live entertainment, though what those Windmill patrons of yesteryear, the respectable gentlemen who climbed across rows of seats in their efforts to reach the front, would think of Let's Get Laid is an interesting conjecture. Nothing better illustrates the onrush of the permissive society than a comparison between ...

... TAKE twin brothers, one a respectable astronomer anticipating a knighthood, the other an advertising rake sleeping with his secretaries; the two wives both ex-Windmill fandancers; a jazz-playing, cycling nun; a queer gossipwriter; a loyal prim secretary losing her skirt; all in the good brother's house, which bad brother wants to borrow for the night all these ingredients from a handful of ...

... 'Alceste'--Scottish Opera MUCH AS one is bound to acknowledge Gluck's importance in the operatic scene, his aim, for instance, to bridge the difference in approach of the Italian and French styles of operatic writing, which preceded his own operas and to make opera a more coherent dramatic and musical entity, his work, in performance, can tend to drag. This is to some extent, of course, a ...