You're a beautiful woman probably...

We went to see Cabaret at the Sunderland Empire last night. This touring production (directed by Rufus Norris, featuring Wayne Sleep as the EmCee and Samantha Barks as Sally) really just served to show how brilliant the film was. On the plus side, the stage show generally looked excellent, with appropriately tacky sets for the Kitkat Club and more subdued colours and lighting for the boarding house. Samantha Barks as Sally shows great promise and gave an impressive performance in the musical's better songs. Unfortunately, attention to detail was sadly lacking. Anyone who knows a word or two of German can tell you that their translation of "Miss" is not pronounced "Fraw-line", and yet here, we had at least three supposedly German natives saying it that way. While that would be understandable in an amateur production, in the professional theatre it just isn't good enough. The problems didn't end there. The whole thing didn't seem to "gel":...

New Year's Day can be pretty grim - one way of lightening things is to go out for a walk (which I'll be doing soon); another is to listen to some good music (my plan for later on). Catching the famous theme from Brief encounter on Classic FM one Sunday morning reminded me of how wonderful I think Rachmaninov's Piano Concertos are - and there are more reasons than that film why Number 2 is his most popular. Later on, listening to Radio 4's Desert island discs (and exercising my prejudices, thinking that some of the guests' musical choices are unbelievably poor) made me think of my own list of favourite records. Try it yourself - if you have any love of music at all, it's quite hard to get it down to eight! Debussy's La mer (strangely enough, not all about his mother...). Debussy was a pioneer of a whole new musical sound, dubbed "impressionism", and this is probably my favourite example. Finzi's Severn Rhapsody . An encapsulation of everyth...