Rosie Edwards Archives - North West End UK

Klezmer: Old and New – Manchester Jewish Museum

13Mar

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

Klezmer: Old and New – Manchester Jewish Museum

Out with the old and in with the new? Well, sometimes it’s actually better to bring together the best of them which in this case resulted in a wonderful evening of klezmer, performed by Susi Evans and Szilvia Csaranko – a klezmer clarinet and accordion duo – with support from the Michael Kahan Kapelye, in the beautiful surround of this former Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. Evans and Csaranko perform tunes from old manuscripts, collected in Jewish villages in Ukraine between 1912-1914 and only recently rediscovered in Kyiv. With no defined chords, these are melodies played by generations of klezmer musicians at Jewish weddings and other celebrations, contemporaneous with the likes of Beethoven and undoubtedly influencing the operatic opus of Offenbach and Verdi, and these informed the...

Dressing Gown – Theatre at the Tabard

Have you been bed rotting? Are you in your dressing gown? Is it mostly clean? Are you itching to get out and get dressed, or get dressed and get out? It’s amazing how the trappings of coziness can feel so oppressively snug when certain conditions of comfort are not met. The intimacy of the the Tabard Theatre for instance shifts into something else entirely under the influence of Andrew Cartmel’s new bedroom farce, aptly if unimaginatively titled Dressing Gown so called after its leading man’s essential predicament and sole comfort. Jamie Hutchins stars as Ash, a theatre director whose morning recumbence is interrupted by a series of visitors who each come bearing a unique challenge to his efforts to finally clothe himself. Much like the play’s title, its characters and plot are p...

God of Carnage – OSO Arts Centre

Children get themselves into a bucketload of trouble these days. Yet can we blame them? After all, their loving, nurturing, “responsible” parents seem to do even worse... “God of Carnage” follows Alain and Anette Reile and Veronique and Michel Vallon (two seemingly happy, married couples) as they meet to attempt resolving a scuffle between their sons. We watch as their demeanours fade from respectable and polite to reckless and crude to a point where the situation at hand is forgotten and replaced with, well to say the least: Carnage. As the train speeds along beside the Vallon home, one wonders if discussion will get back on track. I was personally enthralled by this adaptation performed at the OSO Arts Centre. The staging of this production perfectly complemented its naturalistic s...