GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO RUTH LEON’S THEATREWISE

I always try for variety in Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise and this week you have an opera, a movie, a ballet, a musical, and a documentary about two famous artists, and their invention of an entirely new way of seeing. And a song from a great woman whom we lost this week. Most of the events I choose can be viewed free of charge but I also consult a number of websites that require a subscription or rental fee. I’ve made the judgement that what they offer is worth the price but the choice is yours. As a guide, anything marked Click here to watch is free but if I’ve listed a website, such as Medici or Ntathome, chances are that there will be a fee.

This week we have Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims, a light-hearted 1825 opera which was only performed four times before falling into obscurity for a century and a half but now happily rediscovered and reconstructed at this year’s Salzburg Festival with a very starry cast including Cecilia Bartoli and Marina Viotti.

It would have been the birthday of the outlaw Jesse James on Saturday so I’ve found a full-length Western called The True Story of Jesse James, which probably isn’t.

Also this week is Matthew Bourne’s ballet adaptation of the Powell and Pressburger’s classic 1949 movie, The Red Shoes.

And if you’ve ever puzzled over Cubism and wondered how this entirely new way of painting came to be, puzzle no more as here is a film about its two progenitors, George Braque and Pable Picasso.

I noticed that Hadestown, the successful Broadway and West End musical, has just become available online but, sadly, not yet in the UK so I’ve included it for all you ‘furriners’.

And, because I knew her slightly and loved her, I couldn’t leave out Dolly this week. She was one of the kindest and brightest and funniest women I ever met.

Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You

Click here to watch

To meet Dolly, even fleetingly, was to become her friend. She was just that kind of person. I went to Nashville to make a programme for the BBC about country music, about which I knew next to nothing.

Dolly and her fellow country artists made me welcome, taught me enough about the music not to make a fool of myself on air, and were generous with their time and support. Dolly in particular made it her business to help, to introduce me to the right people, to take care of me and, before I left Nashville, she threw me a riotous party at which catfish was the main culinary attraction.

That was it. I left Nashville and, although we exchanged Christmas cards through the intervening years, we never met again, but I will always cherish the memory of that brief time when Dolly Parton was my friend.

She wrote this song as a gift for her performing partner Porter Waggoner when she left his show to go solo. When she sang “I Will Always Love you”, she meant it, for him and for anyone else lucky enough to cross her path.

Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims at the Salzburg Festival 2026

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Cecilia Bartoli and Marina Viotti lead an exceptional lineup of opera stars in the 2026 Salzburg Festival production of Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims, staged with exuberant color and dynamism by Barrie Kosky The final Italian-language opera by Rossini, Il viaggio a Reims was written to accompany the coronation of King Charles X in Reims in 1825 and only performed four times before falling into obscurity for a century and a half.

Rediscovered and reconstructed in the 1970s and finally performed again in 1984, this lighthearted piece — which boasts some of Rossini's finest music — brings together a multinational cast of characters staying at a hotel on their way to the big event, revealing their whims, foibles, and hypocrisies.

The unusually large cast of featured performers includes, but is not limited to, the "exceptional musical intelligence" and "exquisite pianissimi" of the legendary Bartoli as Corinna; Mélissa Petit's "bright, gleaming soprano and dazzling coloratura" in the role of the Contessa di Folleville; a "superb" Viotti as the Marchesa Melibea, whose "deep, bronzed mezzo-soprano [is] velvety and seductive"; Tara Erraught's (Madama Cortese) "remarkable versatility" and "light, silvery tone"; and the "irresistible" Misha Kiria as Baron Trombonok, whose "powerful bass [anchors] the proceedings" (Bachtrack).

The True Story of Jesse James (1957)

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179 years ago this Saturday, on September 5, 1847, a boy was born in Missouri. His father, a slave-owning farmer, having contracted the madness for gold, travelled to California to make his fortune where he promptly died of cholera, leaving his wife, Zerelda, and three children starving on the farm. Zerelda was a resourceful woman and soon found a replacement husband but he didn’t suit so she left him and married Dr. Reuben Samuel, a respectable doctor, with whom she had four more children.
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I don’t think she expected her two oldest sons, Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, and Jesse Woodson James, to become outlaws, bank and train robbers, guerrilla fighters, and leaders of the James–Younger Gang. But they did.

Raised a Southern sympathizer in the "Little Dixie" area of Missouri, Jesse and his older brother Frank joined pro-Confederate guerrillas known as "bushwhackers" operating in Missouri and Kansas during the American Civil War.

After the war, as members of various gangs of outlaws, the James brothers robbed banks, stagecoaches and trains across the Midwest, gaining national fame and often popular sympathy despite the brutality of their crimes. The brothers were most active as members of their own gang from about 1866 until 1876, when as a result of their attempted robbery of a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, several members of the gang were captured or killed.

They continued in crime for several years afterward, recruiting new members, but came under increasing pressure from law enforcement seeking to bring them to justice. On April 3, 1882, Jesse James was shot and killed by Robert Ford, a new recruit to the gang who hoped to collect a reward on James' head and a promised amnesty for his previous crimes.

Already a celebrity in life, Jesse James became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death.

Here is a feature film which purports to tell “The True Story of Jesse James", made in 1957 and starring Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, Hope Lange and Agnes Moorehead. How ‘true’ it is is anyone’s guess but I couldn’t resist it because it’s an old-fashioned Western they don’t make ‘em like anymore.

Braque & Picasso: A Collaboration

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Everybody has heard of Picasso. Everybody. But the style of art for which he is perhaps best known, Cubism, was never his alone. His collaborator, sometime friend, fellow innovator and rival was the great George Braque about whom much less is known.

George Braque died on August 31st 1963, 63 years ago today. Here is a film by Mark Page that makes sense of the relationship between Braque and Picasso and attempts to understand what it is about Cubism that caused such outrage then and still intrigues us today.

Hadestown: The Musical

Click here to rent or stream on Prime Video (not yet available in the UK)

Time to go way down to Hadestown as the successful, Tony-winning Broadway musical is released online.

Last year, the show was filmed over the course of three live performances in London with five of its original Broadway stars: Reeve Carney as Orpheus, André De Shields as Hermes, Amber Gray as Persephone, Eva Noblezada as Eurydice and Patrick Page as Hades.

Released theatrically earlier this summer, the film was a critical and commercial hit, a much-lauded cinematic capture of Anaïs Mitchell’s indie folk rock musical intertwining the complex love stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Hades and Persephone.

Over the past decade, Hadestown has set many hearts aflame, including Noblezada’s and Carney’s: the two met doing the show and are now married.
This video is not yet available in the UK.

The Red Shoes – Digital Theatre

Click here for Digital Theatre

Matthew Bourne’s double Olivier Award-winning stage adaptation of the legendary 1948 movie The Red Shoes, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, tells a spellbinding tale of obsession, possession and the hard choices artists make in the pursuit of perfection.

The production stars Ashley Shaw as Victoria Page, a rising ballerina who lives to pursue artistic greatness as a dancer, but her ambitions become a battleground for the entangled relationships that drive her dreams, torn between Adam Cooper’s imperious impresario and Dominic North’s intense composer.

Dear Subscribers, Please come back next week for more arts online. This month’s Backgounder, an illustrated look at the life and work of Orson Welles, with all his movies, will arrive in your Inbox this Wednesday but only if you are a Paid Subscriber. If you haven’t yet become a member of the Backgrounder gang, please type your name into the box below. Only Paid Subscribers get Backgrounders, posted on the first Wednesday of every month.

Love, Ruth

I was feeling disgruntled at leaving my Colorado mountaintop yesterday to descend into the usual airline hell to return to New York after three weeks of music, friends, local peaches, fresh corn, birdsong and the glory of the Rockie Mountains.

It had been a wonderful time, topped it off with a production of The Magic Flute as good or better than is offered in the world’s great opera houses. The cast and orchestra were students at the Aspen Music Festival and School. The Queen of the Night was a diminutive soprano who looked 12 and handled the most testing aria in all of opera with the aplomb of a veteran.

But of course my beautiful New York City can always seduce me with a bagel and with the most varied street life in the world. This morning I walked down Broadway, once again becoming one with the noise and bustle of my neighbourhood. The heat roared up from the pavement, a crowd of pigeons gathered to drink from a puddle left by last night’s storm and, amid the hubbub of Sunday morning shoppers, street cries, and impatient drivers, I heard the sweet sound of a solo violin playing Gounod’s Ave Maria.

It would seem impossible to hear anything remotely delicate amidst all that noise but, deciding I wasn’t hallucinating, I stopped to listen. The sound was coming from across six lanes of Broadway traffic where a young man, little more than a boy, was playing his violin, quietly, as though just for himself. He was standing on a busy sidewalk, taking no notice of passers-by, children running about, deliverymen with carts or any other interruptions. In the chaos that was Sunday morning on Broadway, he was delivering peace.

Peace, though he craved it, was very far from the life of Michael Jackson whose 68th birthday would have occurred this week had he not died, absurdly young, at the age of 50.

This week I’m celebrating in different online ways three women whose work I have long admired – Mary Wollstonecraft (and her daughter, Mary Shelley) and Emily Dickinson. Another woman I’ve long admired, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, is doing the honours for Dickinson with a new song cycle by Kevin Puts adapted from her poetry.

There’s also a quirky little film about restoring Jan Van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man, and a terrific performance of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods, filmed live in London’s Regent’s Park.

All these are available via the links beneath the pictures although some may ask you to rent or subscribe to watch.

Mary Wollstonecraft: The Woman Who Wrote Equality Before the World Was Ready

Click here to watch doc

Frankenstein (1931)
Click here to watch

Mary Wollstonecraft was born 229 years ago this Sunday into a prosperous family, but her father, a drunk, squandered the family money. Like her mother, she often suffered abuse at his hands.

Mary spent just a few years in a day school and the disparity betweem her education and her brother’s rankled. Why should she be denied those opportunities just because she was a girl? She resolved, with characteristic determination, to educate herself.

By the age of 25, Wollstonecraft had opened a small girls’ school. That failed, but her intellectual horizons expanded. She befriended Richard Price, a committed advocate for political reform, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and with this group of enlightened thinkers she discovered a forum for debate and the opportunity to shape her own ideas.

After the school closed, she was broke and miserable but found new purpose as an author, becoming a regular contributor to the radical publisher Joseph Johnson’s new literary magazine, the Analytical Review. Johnson agreed to publish Wollstonecraft’s first book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and at Johnson’s weekly dinners Mary met and shared ideas with radical thinkers including Thomas Paine, Anna Barbauld and William Godwin. She thrived in this vibrant intellectual circle.

A more equal society seemed within reach with the revolution unfolding across the English Channel in France. It was the change Mary longed for. Mary quickly penned a furious defence of the revolution's egalitarian ideals: A Vindication of the Rights of Men. This was the first shot fired in a critical war of words, known as the Revolution Controversy, which would include the publication of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man a year later.

Now she went further and claimed equality for her sex. How could true liberty and equality be achieved if restricted to men alone? In her best-selling book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft took the principles of the revolution to their logical conclusion by outlining a vision of equality between the sexes. If women were afforded the same opportunities and education, she wrote, they could contribute as much to society as men. This book made Wollstonecraft’s name.

The execution of Louis XVI in January swiftly dispelled her euphoria at the French Revolution and she despaired at the corruption of the Revolution’s ideals. That same year, 1793, she met the American Gilbert Imlay. Defying moral convention, they became lovers but the relationship proved both short-lived and devastating for Mary although it produced a daughter, Fanny Imlay.

Imlay persuaded her to go to Scandinavia. This trip led to her finest literary work – a travelogue of her Scandinavian journey, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Mary returned to London to discover Imlay was having an affair. Distraught, she threw herself off Putney Bridge into the Thames only to be saved by the intervention of passing watermen.

Wollstonecraft emerged from her suicidal despair to find personal happiness with an unlikely partner. William Godwin was a famous radical philosopher. When they first met at Joseph Johnson’s house Mary and Godwin argued all evening and he left, irritated. In 1796, with typical disregard for convention, Wollstonecraft took the lead and renewed his acquaintance. They fell in love. Although Godwin was opposed on principle to the idea of marriage, when Wollstonecraft became pregnant they married in March 1797.

The couple maintained an unconventional domestic arrangement, living in two homes, communicating through notes. On 30 August 1797, Wollstonecraft went into labour and gave birth to her second child, Mary (who went on to write Frankenstein aged 21). Eleven days later, Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38.

Conservative propagandists seized upon the candid tales of her sexual history and unorthodox religious opinions. On the basis of her perceived sexual immorality, they trashed her memory but today Wollstonecraft is widely recognised as a principal architect in the fight for sexual equality. Her work is still published around the world.

And her daughter’s great first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,, has been adapted, filmed, broadcast, examined and pored over since it was first published on Jan 1 1818. She married the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816, after the suicide of his first wife, Harriet.

Here is a strange little doc about Mary Wollstonecraft and here is the original 1931 movie version of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. Note that the credits read not "Mary Shelley" but “adapted from the novel by Mrs. P. Shelley”.

Michael Jackson: The Victim Of Fame

Click here to watch doc
Click here to rent or subscribe to Michael – full length movie

I never saw Michael Jackson perform live. I studiously avoided the hit musical show Thriller when it opened in the West End. I caught sight of him at Liza Minnelli’s last wedding and what I saw didn’t inspire me to rush up to him and introduce myself. His music, and the reports of child sexual abuse which hovered around him, convinced me that he was not for me.

But there is no doubt that he was a cultural phenomenon. When he died, of a drug overdose, on June 25th 2009, more than 1.6 million fans applied for tickets to his memorial which was the most watched events in streaming history with an estimated US audience of 31.1 million and a worldwide audience of an estimated 2.5 to 3 billion.

So who was he, this child-man who could inspire such devotion from so many? I took a look this week when I noticed that it would have been his 68th birthday on Saturday.

I looked for documentaries about his life. How did an attractive, talented little boy, the 8th of 10 children from a working-class Black family, come to resemble a repulsive grotesque in his 20s? How did this charming young man get involved in adventures with drugs, surgeries, and fantasies which his money and influence allowed him to attempt to make into his real life?

It turns out there are many docs - about his drugs, about his child abuse, about his death - but this is the best of what I found, Michael Jackson: The Victim Of Fame, as clear a statement as we’re going to get until he’s been dead a lot longer.

There is, of course, the recent theatrical movie release, Michael, starring his nephew, Jaafar Jackson, but this is clearly heavily sanitised if not actually fraudulent. I’ve included a link for that too.

Cleaning Jan van Eyck’s 'intimidating' 600-year-old portrait - National Gallery

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How do you clean a 600-year-old portrait? Join National Gallery Conservator Jill Dunkerton as we learn more about the recent conservation of Jan van Eyck’s spectacular ‘Portrait of a Man’, a work thought to be a self portrait of the artist.

​From the removal of almost two centuries of foggy varnish to the restoration of the portrait’s striking background, find out how Jill brings Van Eyck’s 'intimidating' figure into focus.

Emily: No Prisoner Be - Joyce DiDonato and Time For Three

Click here to watch a short intro doc

Click here to watch via Medici

The luminous Joyce DiDonato, one of the most celebrated vocalists of the 21st century, lends her mellifluous mezzo-soprano to the introspective, humorous, heartbreaking poetry of Emily Dickinson in Emily – No Prisoner Be, a boundary-blurring song cycle written for her by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts.

Joined by the Grammy-winning trio Time for Three, gifted instrumentalists and singers who envelop solo lines with lush harmonies, DiDonato pays homage to the famously reclusive poet with a fully committed theatrical performance of a cycle that she calls "the pinnacle of great, masterful storytelling through music and poetry."

Jake Heggie writes in Gramophone, "The staggering, joyful artistry of Joyce DiDonato reminds us that in any generation there are a few giants. Joyce is not only a great, brave and inspiring artist – one of the finest singers of our time – but she is also a transformative presence in the arts. Those who know her repertoire are in awe of her gifts, and those who know nothing of it are instantly engaged. Joyce sings and the world is suddenly brighter. She compels us to listen actively, to hear things anew."

Into The Woods – Digital Theatre

Click here to rent or subscribe

I like this version of Stephen Sondheim’s fairytale musical better than the currently running production transferring to the West End from the Bridge Theatre in London, although that one has more bells and whistles but loses the improvised atmosphere of the original 1987 Broadway production.

Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods weaves together many famous fairy tales in an allegorical story of family, love, growing up and the hazy areas between right and wrong. This critically acclaimed production was captured by Digital Theatre live at London’s Regent’s Park Open Air theatre and was directed by Timothy Sheader. It won the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival and features Hannah Waddingham as the Witch and Jenna Russell as the Baker’s Wife, among many other stand-out performances.

You can rent this for 48hours for £7.99/$11 or an additional £2 will buy access to Digital Theatre’s library of 150 world-class shows on demand.

To quote my friend Julia Watson who writes the fabulous food Substack Tabled, thank you for reading all the way to here. Do come back next week for more arts online.

And those of you who still haven’t yet taken the Backgrounders jump, you can do so by typing your email in the box below. Paid Subscribers have chosen Orson Welles as the next Backgrounder which will be posted on the first Wednesday of next month, Sept 2.

I hope you enjoy your week, at whatever altitude you find yourself. Love, Ruth

GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO RUTH LEON’S THEATREWISE

One more week to go up here on my favourite mountain. The music from the Aspen Music Festival has been superb, the heatwave has abated and with it, the ever-present danger of forest fires, and I am forever grateful for the distinguished musicians who choose to spend their summers here coaching talented young instrumentalists and singers towards a career on the professional concert stage.

They do an amazing job as yesterday’s concert, conducted by a brilliant young international conductor, herself a former student here, proved yet again. Remember the name, Delyana Lazarova, who made glorious sense of a programme consisting of a Samuel Barber Meditation, Rachmaninov’s rarely played Piano Concerto No.4, performed by the dazzling Alexander Malofeev (who is 25 and looks 15), and the Shostakovich 5^th Symphony, played by an orchestra of music students with their teachers in first chairs, as well as I’ve ever heard it in the great concert halls of the world.

Friends, while sad to mark the end of summer with the trees just beginning to show their autumn colours, are revelling in the cooler temperatures. And when I leave my mountain at the end of this week to return to what is laughingly called ‘civilization’ I shall be conscious once again that civilization rests in music and art and curiousity and laughter and the blessed company of friends.

In Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise this week I’ve taken a long look back to the birth of cinema and silent movies’ second most influential male star, Rudolph Valentino. (Charlie Chaplin, of course, was the first).

Inter Alia, the one-woman play starring Rosamund Pike as a judge who is also a mother, a wife, and a friend, is finally available online from the National Theatre and definitely worth watching.

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the first performances of The Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, four operas by Richard Wagner which became a cornerstone of opera production and performance. These days, every self-respecting opera company has a production of one or all of these extraordinary works of art and there are many now online from which to choose.

And I’ve included a good little film from the National Gallery, The Story of Ultramarine from the Silk Road to Renoir, which examines the use of the colour Blue in paintings throughout history.

Nearly everything on this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise is free to watch or requires a small payment or subscription. Just click on the links beneath the pictures to access them all.

Rudolf Valentino – The Great Lover

Click here to watch The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Silent 1921)
Click here to watch The Sheik (Silent 1921)

Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaele Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla was born in Castellaneta, Italy, in May 1895. Who? The bearer of this somewhat unwieldy name (some of which was made up to make himself appear more aristocratic) became Rudolph Valentino, the most romantic male star of the silent film era. Known as the first ‘Latin Lover’, he was only 31 when he died, 100 years ago this Sunday. He had packed a lot into those 31 years.

Exceptionally good-looking and spoiled by his indulgent mother, Valentino left Italy when he was 17 for Paris and Monte Carlo, where he learned the then-controversial tango, and then moved to New York in 1913 where, after a few menial jobs, he went to work as a taxi dancer.

Exhibition ballroom dancer Bonnie Glass, hired him as a replacement for her former partner Clifton Webb, paying him fifty dollars a week. Although he earned more as a taxi dancer, Valentino viewed the position as a strategic step up, as exhibition dancing offered greater visibility and prestige.

Capitalizing on his European image, Valentino was billed as "Signor Rodolfo” and he continued dancing with Glass into 1916, when he teamed up with Joan Sawyer and they toured major eastern cities and even appeared before President Woodrow Wilson in Washington, D.C., an event Valentino later recalled with pride. By now, he was earning $240 a week, a princely sum for a young performer.

In September 1916, Valentino was arrested as a pimp and charged in connection with a so-called "white slave" investigation. The District Attorney described him as a "handsome fellow, about twenty years old, and wears corsets and a wrist watch, often seen dancing in well known hotels and tango parlors with Joan Sawyer and Bonnie Glass." The evidence was insufficient, and after a few days his bail was reduced from $10,000 to $1,500; the charges were soon dropped.

However, his taste for the high life and older women got him embroiled in several high-profile divorces and one murder so he decided it might be sensible to decamp to the West Coast which he did by joining a touring musical troupe.

Although he had been celebrated as a dancer in New York, in Los Angeles he was virtually unknown. He taught dance and built up a following that included an older female clientele who would let him borrow their luxury cars. He may or may not have been a pimp but he certainly was a gigolo.

He started to get bit parts in several films. Inevitably, it was a woman who gave him his big break. Screenwriter June Mathis cast him in the role of Julio Desnoyers in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse which was released in 1921 and became a commercial and critical success. It was one of the first films to make $1,000,000 at the box office, the sixth-highest grossing silent film ever.

Several indifferent films followed but then Jesse L. Lasky cast him in a role that solidified his reputation as the ‘Latin Lover.’ In The Sheik (1921), Valentino played the starring role of Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan. The film was a major success and defined not only his career but his image and legacy. It launched Rudolph Valentino to international stardom, influencing fashion and sparking the desert romance craze.

The Sheik follows the abduction of a spirited Englishwoman by a charismatic Arabian sheik during her solo desert journey, sparking a turbulent romance amid cultural clashes and danger. Valentino tried to distance the character from a stereotypical portrayal of an Arab man.

Over the next 15 months, he starred in four more feature-length films and began work on another Mathis-penned film, Blood and Sand which became one of the four top-grossing movies of 1922, breaking attendance records, and grossing $37,400 at the Rivoli Theatre alone. Valentino considered this one of his best films.

He had married Jean Acker in 1919, before he became a star. On their wedding night, she locked Valentino out of their hotel room. She had her reasons and although he tried to make the marriage work, she was adamant. He then married designer Natacha Rombova in 1922 and was promptly slapped with a bigamy suit as his divorce from Acker was not yet final. They subsequently remarried although they divorced, acrimoniously, in 1926. Hints about his sexuality, while unpublicised in his lifetime, surfaced after his death with several men asserting brief relationships with him.

Throughout the rest of his short life Valentino was embroiled in numerous battles with the studios, with his ex-wives and with his directors, but he was known to be a kind, quiet man and a good friend. His friend Charlie Chaplin said of him, "Valentino had an air of sadness. He wore his success gracefully, appearing almost subdued by it. He was intelligent, quiet, and without vanity... No man had greater attraction for women than Valentino; no man was more deceived by them."

He died of “peritonitis and septic endocarditis", after an 8-day illness in August 1026 but his image and influence remains, even one hundred years later. Here are his first successes so you can judge for yourselves.

The Story of Ultramarine from the Silk Road to Renoir: The Chemistry of Colour

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How did ultramarine go from being more expensive than gold to one of the cheapest pigments for artists? Follow the journey of this vibrant blue colour, ultramarine, one of the most celebrated and sought-after pigments in art.

Joanna Russell from National Gallery's Scientific Department looks at the use of this blue in 'The Wilton Diptych' and Renoir's 'Umbrellas'.

The Chemistry of Colour series explores some of the weird and wonderful ways pigments were historically produced, and how we can identify them today.

Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) - Richard Wagner

Click here for Medici

I’m a week late with this one but it’s so important in the history of opera that I can’t leave it out just because I didn’t have space for it last week.

On August 13, 1876, 150 years ago last Thursday, the likes of Tchaikovsky, Liszt, and King Ludwig II gathered in Bavaria for the premiere of Wagner’s epic four-part cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung, one of opera’s most towering achievements.

150 years on, you can watch the entire saga from your living room. There are many versions of this cycle available online. The one on offer from Medici comes from the Zurich Opera with an all-star cast.

I’ve given you the link to the dedicated page from the Medici website as this is a more wide-ranging and complete introduction to the cycle than I can provide. Assuming you already have a subscription to Medici as I often urge you to take up, you can discover the mythological universe of the Ring there and scroll to browse versions of the four famous operas.

If you prefer, there are full-length Rings on a variety of different websites from the Met in New York, the Royal Opera House, San Francisco Opera, Opera North, and several others. If you have any difficulty locating them, email me and I’ll find the links for you.

Inter Alia – Rosamund Pike

Click here for National Theatre

A few weeks ago, I jumped the gun by urging you to watch the National Theatre’s production of the enormously popular one-woman play about a judge who is also a mother, a wife, and a friend, starring an impressive Rosamund Pike.

It turned out that, because Inter Alia was then enjoying a record-breaking run in New York, the online version was delayed. It isn’t now. We can watch the entire play, as originally produced, on National Theatre At Home.

Jessica Parks is a judge. Her career exists inter alia (among other things). How will one unthinkable event pull into question all aspects of her life?

Following their global phenomenon Prima Facie, Suzie Miller and Justin Martin reunite with this searing examination of modern motherhood and masculinity. This 'simply superb' (Financial Times) play features Olivier award-winning Rosamund Pike and music from Erin Le Count and Jakwob.

This 'raw, nuanced must-see' (Radio Times) is available to stream on National Theatre at Home today. Sorry for the delay, my fault entirely.

Thank you for your company as always. I value your comments, brickbats and occasional compliments immeasurably so keep them coming. More arts online next week from Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise.

Paid Subscribers have now decided that the subject of next month’s Backgrounder will be that extraordinary man of the cinema and theatre, Orson Welles. If you haven’t yet joined the Backgrounder gang you can do so today by typing your email into the box below.

Have a wonderful week, whatever mountain you find yourself on.

Ruth xx

Welcome to Paradise. Although, given the unusually high temperatures up here in the mountains of Colorado, it can, at times, resemble the other place. But it’s still my idea of Heaven.

The music is certainly heavenly. Three concerts by Gil Shaham playing all the Beethoven Violin Sonatas. Five young opera singers at the very start of their careers taking on a great aria each to help five young conductors understand what conducting an opera feels like. An international conductor, Leonard Slatkin, working with an orchestra of kids, each hanging on his every gesture, to produce a splendid rendering of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. A famous composer, Joan Tower, now 88, talking to the audience about her music and then hearing it played perfectly. Worldclass soloists given the time and space to experiment. A stunning Mahler 1st. This is a cornucopia of music so plentiful that it’s almost an assault. Yesterday I attended and enjoyed three concerts. Today ‘only’ two. And I’ve just been here a week.

Thank goodness, WiFi works up here so here is this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise. Several anniversaries coincided this week and I’ve used them as a kind of theme although the arts are different in each case.

Edith Wharton, novelist, short-story writer, botanist and Pulitzer Prize-winner was a late starter but she made up for lost time. Here is a good doc about her and a movie of her most important novel, The House of Mirth. She died 89 years ago this week.

The Musee du Louvre opened its doors as a museum 233 years ago this week but its history is much older. 800 years ago it was a fortress guarding the French against the English. Here are two films about this Paris landmark.

The Wizard of Oz, perhaps the most beloved and certainly the most lasting family film, had its first public screening Aug 12^th 1939, 87 years ago this Wednesday at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Here is the original movie in full and a documentary about the backstage shennanigans that surrounded its making.

And, because the concerts I’m seeing this year in Aspen are not yet available online, I thought to share one of last year’s. Conductor Jane Glover teaming up with pianist Jeremy Denk for Anna Clyne’s Atlas! Concerto and Schubert’s mighty 9^th Symphony. Wonderful.

All these are available by clicking the link beneath the pictures and nearly all are free to watch.

The Secret Life of Edith Wharton

Click here to watch The Secret Life of Edith Wharton
Click here to watch The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton, Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer, died on August 11th, 1937, 89 years ago this week.

Born Edith Jones to a fabulously wealthy New York family whose position gave rise to the expression “keeping up with the Joneses”, she was uniquely placed to write about the Gilded Age.

Nothing more was expected of young Edith than to marry a rich man and settle for summers in Rhode Island, winters in the South of France and the New York life of a society princess. But although she did her best to fit in with the stereotype, she was just too clever and too different to be able to live the life she had been born to.

Her first engagement was broken by the young man‘s objection to his fiancee’s intellectualism. She didn’t do much better as the wife of Teddy Wharton whose passion for horses, dogs and automobiles was at odds with Edith’s passion for books, learning and languages, but they stayed married for 14 years, through many of Teddy’s affairs and at least one of Edith’s.

Edith had always written – poetry, short stories and even a novel, but in secret, until her divorce (big scandal) freed her to see herself finally as a writer. In all, she wrote over 40 books including The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Custom of the Country.

Wharton lived much of her life in France and was honored with the French Legion of Honor for her relief work during World War I.
She was also an accomplished interior and garden designer, she co-authored The Decoration of Houses.

She left a lasting legacy with her incisive portrayals of class, tradition, and social constraint.

Here’s an excellent short documentary about her.

And here is Terence Davies' adaptation of her 1905 novel, The House of Mirth. This 2000 drama, produced for Granada TV, stars Gillian Anderson. Eric Stoltz, Laura Linney, and Dan Aykroyd.

The Making of a Movie Classic: The Wizard of Oz

Click here to watch the documentary
Click here to rent The Wizard of Oz for $4.99

On August 12 1939, a movie premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. 13 days later it would be released everytwhere. Nobody, not its producers and certanly not its star, imagined that they had made one of the most beloved and lasting films in the history of the medium. It wasn't easy, by the time shooting wrapped, it had been worked on by no fewer than 14 writers and 5 of Hollywood's top directors - George Cukor, King Vidor, Victor Fleming, Norman Taurog, Richard Thorpe.

It was worth it, though. This visually stunning classic was acclaimed for its Technicolor innovation, memorable characters, and timeless music. Praised as one of the greatest family films, it won two Oscars, became a cultural touchstone, and is preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry.

The Wizard of Oz follows Dorothy Gale, a Kansas farm girl swept by a tornado into the magical Land of Oz, where she journeys with new friends to meet a powerful wizard who might help her return home.

Hosted by Angela Lansbury, this doc includes reminiscences from its stars and its crew, its producers, its composers and its first audiences.

Now, when we know the knock-offs, the parodies, the adaptations and the updates better than the original, here is the backstage story of the making of The Wizard of Oz and, of course, the real thing, the movie itself.

Musee du Louvre

Click here to watch From Fortress to the World's Greatest Museum
​Click here to watch The Louvre – film by Lucy Jarvis

233 years ago tomorrow, on August 10th 1793, a remarkable museum opened its doors. But the Palais du Louvre is much older than that. Let’s go back a bit. In fact, let’s go back a lot.

The Louvre Palace has evolved from a medieval fortress to the world's largest art museum, reflecting centuries of French history, royal ambition, and architectural innovation.

It began in the late 12th century as a fortress commissioned by King Philip II to defend Paris against potential invasions, particularly from English forces during the Hundred Years' War.

During the Renaissance, under King Francis I in the 16th century, the Louvre began its transformation from a military stronghold into a royal palace. Francis I initiated extensive reconstruction, adding Italian Renaissance elements and introducing the architectural style of elegant courtyards and ornate façades.
The palace was progressively expanded by French monarchs over centuries.

The French Revolution brought a radical change to the Louvre’s function. In 1793, revolutionary authorities converted parts of the palace into a public museum, opening the first galleries with artworks seized from the monarchy and the church. This laid the foundation for the Louvre as a cultural institution accessible to the public rather than solely serving the monarchy.

In the 19th century, under Napoleon I, the museum’s collection expanded significantly, reflecting the emperor’s ambition to showcase the arts of Europe and beyond. Additional restoration and modernization projects in the 20th century, balanced preservation with the needs of a modern museum and I.M.Pei’s glass pyramid entrance was completed in 1989.

Today, the Louvre reflects over 800 years of history, combining medieval, Renaissance, and classical architecture while hosting one of the richest art collections in the world, symbolizing France's cultural heritage.

Here are two documentaries about the fortress and the museum.
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One displays the history and growth of the Palais du Louvre.

The other, made by Award-winning American filmmaker Lucy Jarvis, is revelatory. Before this film no-one, was ever permitted to film inside the Louvre. Through her eyes, the priceless treasures and incomparable art are revealed.

Set against the panoramic history of France, and hosted by Charles Boyer, The Louvre, regal palace and home to so many of the world's great gifts of art, becomes THE LOUVRE, winner of fourteen national and international awards, so rich in its story that even the Mona Lisa smiles.

Jane Glover conducts Anna Clyne and Schubert — With Jeremy Denk

Click here to watch

And because this year’s Aspen concerts aren’t yet ready for online distribution, I thought I'd give you a taste of what I'm enjoying up here by including a lovely concert from last year's Aspen Festival.
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Last summer, two longtime friends of the Aspen Music Festival and School, pianist Jeremy Denk and conductor Jane Glover, teamed up for a performance of Anna Clyne's gorgeous piano concerto ATLAS!

Denk, "a pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs" (New York Times), takes the solo role in the thrilling new four-movement concerto, a "brilliantly colored musical scrapbook" (The Guardian) inspired by the monumental collection of the same name by German artist Gerhard Richter.

After the break, Jane Glover leads the Aspen Chamber Symphony in Schubert's Symphony No. 9, known as "the Great" for its grand scope and innovative style, almost lost to history but for the efforts of Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn to bring it to light decades after Schubert's death.

Dear Theatrewise free subscribers, I wish you a glorious week. Please come back next week for more arts online.

Dear Paid Subscribers, I’m waiting for you to decide who should be the subject of next month’s Backgrounder. I’m delighted that his month’s Marilyn Monroe went down so well with you. Who’s next?

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To the world, Marilyn Monroe was the archetypal Dumb Blonde. But she was far from dumb and, at the beginning of her career, she wasn’t even blonde.

Read more

GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO RUTH LEON’S THEATREWISE

I’m off to the mountains for three weeks of self-indulgence. This is my annual decompression from London and New York, three weeks of beautiful music and gorgeous scenery in the Rocky Mountains. Once a year, at the Aspen Music Festival and School, I hear young musicians trying out their professional chops, their teachers a summer faculty of professional artists giving their time to train the next generation of singers and instrumentalists. I particularly love the opportunities for these musicians who spend their time playing in top orchestras the rest of the year, to perform with their colleagues the chamber music they don’t have time for during the year, with me as nothing more than an avid listener, freed from the discipline of having to write about them.

Every year I meet up with friends I only see in these enchanted weeks when we arrive from all over the world to share the sun, the music and the mountains. Oh, and a year’s worth of gossip. But don’t be alarmed. Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise will continue to drop into your Inboxes every Monday as usual. It may be a little later than usual because of the timezone difference and the intermittent WiFi way up on the top of the mountain, but it’ll get to you somehow.

Even this week, with the scramble of preparation, I’ve found some gems to share with you. My previous Festival jaunt earlier this summer has just yielded a fine performance from Ojai, Geneva Lewis performing a composition by the conductor Essa-Pekka Salonen.

From tomorrow, Tuesday, you’ll be able to watch a production of Our Town from London’s National Theatre, reset in rural Wales and led by Michael Sheen.

And here’s a forgotten moviestar, very big in her day, the actress/swimmer Esther Williams in one of her silliest ‘acquamusicals’, Skirts Ahoy!

Far from forgotten, and much more tragic, we mark the anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe. She is the subject of this month’s Backgrounder so be sure to type your name into the box to join the Backgrounder gang if you haven’t already done so.

All except the Pocket Review of Liz Callaway’s Stephen Schwarz cabaret which I enjoyed just before leaving London, are available at the touch of a button on the links just below the pictures.

Lachen Verlernt - Ojai Festival

Click here to watch

Recently, I wrote about a very happy week I spent at the Ojai Festival in California. The music was challenging, contemporary classical works performed by excellent musicians, most of whom were new to me as was the music.

The Music Director this year was the distinguished conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and I admit that I was unaware that he is also an important composer. This is his Lachen Verlernt which was performed by Geneva Lewis at the final concert of this year’s Festival at their magical outdoor concert venue, the Libbey Bowl.

The composition dates from 2002 and has become well-established as a standard work for violinists around the world.

Esa-Pekka Salonen writes: “The title Lachen Verlernt (Laughing Unlearnt) is a quotation from the ninth movement of Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Gebet an Pierrot (Prayer to Pierrot). The narrator declares that she has unlearnt the skill of laughing and begs Pierrot, the “Horse-doctor to the soul”, to give it back to her. I felt that this is a very moving metaphor of a performer: a serious clown trying to help the audience to connect with emotions they have lost, or believe they have lost.”

The performer in this case is the attractive Geneva Lewis, new to me, who seems completely happy with this challenging composition as well as with several other performances I caught during the Festival, a young musician leaning into the music of her own time. She plays a 1776 Guadagnini lest we think that everything about this compelling young violinist is new.

Our Town – National Theatre

Click here for National Theatre

You might think that Our Town by Thornton Wilder is the most American of American plays. It is, and also perhaps the most universal. Here is Wilder’s masterpiece set in Wales and told through a Welsh lens. This version, directed by Francesca Goodridge, gives this timeless story of life, love and community a new resonance. Grovers Corners is just a small town like any other and this is a snapshot of the everyday lives of its citizens between 1901 and 1913.

That most Welsh of Welsh actors, Michael Sheen, as the Stage Manager/master of ceremonies, leads the cast in the Welsh National Theatre and Rose Theatre production of Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece.

The first performance of Our Town was at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 22, 1938. It went on to success on Broadway in that year and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Revived often on Broadway and beyond, it has been translated into dozens of languages and is always in production somewhere in the world. Playwright Edward Albee called Our Town “the greatest American play ever written."
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This production is available from tomorrow, Tuesday, 4 August and is not to be missed.

Esther Williams - Aquastar

Click here to rent Skirts Ahoy! for $3.99

Esther Williams, almost forgotten today, was a record-breaking champion swimmer who became a moviestar. She would have been 105 years old on Sunday. Unable to compete in the 1940 Summer Olympics because of the outbreak of World War II, she joined Billy Rose's Aquacade with Olympic champion Johnny Weissmuller (before his Tarzan days), where she too was spotted by a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scout. At MGM she was known as ‘The Million Dollar Mermaid’.

She made a series of films in the 1940s and early 1950s known as "aquamusicals", which featured elaborate performances with synchronised swimming and diving.

Married four times, Esther Williams was a good busineswoman, endorsing a number of products and serving as a commentator for the synchronised swimming competition at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Here is one of her acquamusicals, a throwback memory of a time when swimming was considered sexy. Skirts Ahoy! features two swim numbers with Williams and a star turn by Debbie Reynolds and Bobby Van, who sparkle in a special song-and-dance routine to "Oh By Jingo!" Ahoy, indeed!

Marilyn Monroe RIP

Click here to watch The Misfits trailer

More famous and more tragic than Esther Williams, Marilyn Monroe died on August 4th, 1963, 64 years ago on Tuesday. Or August 5th, depending on which version of her story you believe. She would have been 100 years old today but she died at the age of 36 of an overdose of barbiturates.

The Misfits, written for her by her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, was her last completed film. It was also the last film of her co-star, Clark Gable, who had a heart attack the day after the movie wrapped.

For more, much more, about the ultimate ‘Blonde Bombshell’ you’ll have to become a Paid Subscriber by typing your email in the box because this month’s Backgrounder tells the whole Marilyn Monroe story and it will land in the Inboxes of Paid Subscribers on Wednesday.

_{POCKET REVIEW}

_{Liz Callaway – The Wizard and I - Crazy Coqs}

She bounds onto the stage at Crazy Coqs like a little blonde pixie with a big smile and obvious delight at the huge welcome she gets from the loving London audience.

And what’s not to love? This bundle of musical energy has a secure soprano that can soar into the rafters and whisper into the furthest corners of the room. Liz Callaway is fun. Being in a room where she is the entertainment is a great feeling. The audience can relax and trust her to give them an evening of song that will make them laugh, think and occasionally weep (although not for long). She and her director (her husband, Dan Foster) have thought through every line of her lyrics and have mined them for every shade of meaning.

Liz has a particular friendship with, and affinity for, the music of Stephen Schwarz and The Wizard and I is an anthology of his songs. It is also a sort of musical autobiography as many of Liz’s theatre triumphs have come in Stephen Schwarz shows.

She starts with one of my favourites, Corner of the Sky from Pippin, and sails quickly through Godspell (Bless the Lord), on to Wicked and a medley of familiar Schwarz tunes until, touchingly, she sings a song he wrote especially for her, Fearless.

She ends, as she must, with the song that is her favourite and most associated with her, Meadowlark from The Baker’s Wife.

She keeps her patter between songs to what needs to be said and no more. Spending an evening with Liz Callaway is like having a good time with a friend, a friend with a terrific voice, a reservoir of good songs, and professionalism to spare.

Thank you for being here. You can’t imagine what a thrill it is to know that you’re with me, week after week, discovering the treasures of the arts online. Next week - more arts online.

And if you haven’t already joined the Backgrounders gang you can do so now by typing your email into the box below and, on Wednesday, receiving your first monthly Backgrounder, this one for Marilyn Monroe.

And welcome to London at its summer best. The heatwave has given way to perfect weather, warm but not hot. No rain for 37 days and the gardeners among us are tearing their hair out especially as there’s a hosepipe ban and they’re having to water ‘by hand’. My windowboxes are gorgeous and easily hydrated. I’m sorry to leave them behind when I set off tomorrow for New York. I’m told that it’s hotter there and much less comfortable.

At least we’re not in France or Spain where many of the poor souls who have gone there on vacation are being evacuated from their homes and hotels by some very scary forest fires which are threatening both beaches and cities.

For those trying to avoid the heatwaves on both sides of the Atlantic there are ways to enjoy the arts without leaving home. This week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise travels to the new home of the Evian Recontres in France for two delectable all-Brahms concert played by some of the world’s top musicians.

If you love old movies you can wallow in Wuthering Heights memories. I’ve gone back to the 1939 weepie starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon with a nod to other adaptations over the years.

Here’s a lovely little film about the flowers at the Met Museum, both live and in the paintings. But should you find yourselves venturing out to the theatre this week, I’ve included a review of a new play by a successful contemporary playwright.

To watch the flowers and the concerts, just click the links beneath the photos and there’s also a link to watch Olivier and Oberon.

Two all-Brahms concerts from Evian

Click here to watch Concert One
Click here to watch Concert Two

With the summer music festivals in full swing, here are two lovely Brahms concerts from Rencontres musicales d'Évian’s brand-new concert hall, La Source Vive, specifically designed for exceptional chamber acoustics. In the first, violinist María Dueñas and pianist Denis Kozhukhin open with Brahms’s Third (and final) Violin Sonata.

Premiered in 1888 by Brahms himself with the great Joseph Joachim, the virtuosic sonata is more tonally abstract and thematically darker than his previous two Violin Sonatas written around the same time.

Then, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Renaud Capuçon, and violist Timothy Ridout join forces for Brahms’s powerfully intimate Third Piano Quartet. Originally written in 1856 amidst Brahms’s infatuation with composer Clara Schumann, the final version — now moved down a semitone into the mournful key of C minor — was revised and finished 20 years later, yet retains clear allusions to the tempestuous, turbulent passions of the young composer.

In the other all-Brahms chamber concert, violist Timothy Ridout and pianist Guillaume Bellom showcase a diverse palette of Brahmsian colors in the lesser-played Viola Sonata No. 2, whose intimate, poised outer movements conceal an unexpectedly powerful scherzo at the work’s center.

Then, violinist Renaud Capuçon joins pianist Emanuel Ax for Brahms’s quintessentially Romantic Violin Sonata No. 1. Nicknamed “Rain” in reference to Brahms's own Regenlied (“Rain Song”), one of the two Lieder which inspired it, this tender and introspective work even features the pitter-patter of raindrops in its final movement.
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The unique charm of the French horn is then highlighted in Brahms’s unconventional yet utterly beautiful Horn Trio in E-flat Major, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal horn, Stefan Dohr, alongside Capuçon and pianist Denis Kozhukhin.

Flowers and Gardens – Met Museum

In this season where flowers are everywhere in full bloom, I remembered this sweet film dating from the early ‘80s about the flower arrangements in the Museum itself and the paintings they relate to.

Flowers are more than merely decorative. People throughout time have used them as storytelling devices. Across eras and cultures, they have been cherished for their healing properties, as well as their religious and folkloric significance. In this 1982 film, learn about flowers in The Met collection, from the daily floral arrangements that grace the Great Hall to the medieval gardens at The Met Cloisters.

Explore the paintings of Monet, Manet, and Redon and see several standout examples of Japanese decorative art, including a portable picnic set that draws design inspiration from the peony blossom.

Wuthering Heights (1939) Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier

Click here to watch

The anniversary of Emily Bronte’s birth on 30 July 1818 is just an excuse to take a look at all the film, TV and video adaptations of her only novel, Wuthering Heights, in a year when a new movie, this one starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, directed by Emerald Fennell, was released. This tale of doomed love on the Yorkshire moors first published in 1847 under the penname Ellis Bell, is irresistible to adaptors.

To my amazement, I counted nine before I stopped counting, including Yoshishege Yoshida's primal, blood-drenched 1988 film which transplants the story to feudal Japan. Then there's Luis Bunuel's1953 version, set in the deserts of Mexico. Heathcliff (here called Alejandro, played by Jorge Mistral) and Irasema Dilian's Catalina, are crazed with lust, super-Catholic and genuinely scared they might go to Hell.

Not included are the many Indian versions - the Bollywood one is apparently a lot of fun, nor the Philipino one because I'm not sure when and where it was made.

I’m told there was a silent adaptation in 1920 directed by one A.V.Bramble but no prints remain. So moving swiftly on to 1958 and the TV version with Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris, only recently rediscovered. According to writer Samantha Ellis, Rosemary Harris had stepped in at the last minute to play Cathy and had a script hidden under a pillow for the deathbed scene because she hadn’t had time to learn her lines.

Richard Burton didn’t let the small set cramp his style and played Heathcliff as though he was at the Old Vic, booming and growling, in billowing pirate shirts and tight trousers, tearing about, knocking things over, hoicking Cathy about and kissing her very much like he means it. It isn’t exactly good but my goodness it’s sexy.

Another TV version that survives is director Peter Sasdy’s series from 1967. Ian McShane is a positively demonic Heathcliff to Angela Scoular’s cooler, bolder Cathy. This is the version that inspired Kate Bush’s eerie, keening song. Written over one moonlit night, when she was just 18, recorded in a single take, Kate Bush’s is a Gothic melodrama in miniature, with Bush playing Cathy’s tormented ghost.

In Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 version, Sinéad O’Connor as Emily Brontë stalks the moors in a sumptuous cloak to introduce the story and sternly warn us it isn’t going to be funny. Ralph Fiennes smoulders dangerously as Heathcliff and Juliette Binoche plays both Cathy and her daughter in a giggly French accent.

In 2011, Andrea Arnold’s raw, harrowing film is best known for finally casting a black Heathcliff, or rather two, with Solomon Glave playing him as a child and James Howson as an adult. Brontë never definitively specified Heathcliff’s race, but she did describe his darkness, difference and otherness, and Arnold’s film really brings out the way Heathcliff was a victim of both racism and class. She pares the story down to its essence, makes the moors look elemental and shiveringly brutal, and ramps up the cruelty – but also the tenderness of Cathy and Heathcliff’s childhood.
And on and on.

Wuthering Heights has even been transplanted to a sun-drenched California school in a 2015 TV series called, gleefully, Wuthering High School; (Heath)Cliff Richard has made a musical of it; and in 2022 a video game called Limbus Company allowed you to go into a haunted house based on Cathy’s, and battle mysterious ‘Butlers’.

But it is William Wyler’s 1939 black and white swoonfest that is still ranked top on film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. The clothes are pure old Hollywood glamour, the moody cinematography is sublime, Merle Oberon’s Cathy is ethereal, Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff is brooding. Does it matter that they ditched the second half of the story, ending with the lovers’ ghosts walking hand in hand through the snow? Not really. This is Wuthering Heights reimagined as a Thirties weepie and on its own terms, it is genius.

POCKET REVIEW

The Truth – Apollo Theatre

The Truth is another popular play in the series by Florian Zeller, translated by Christopher Hampton, this one a comedic knock-off of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal beautifully played by four brilliant actors at the top of their form. It’s less a comedy than a farce, about two couples, apparently happily married, swimming in deceit.

Stephen Mangan is manic as Michel, the husband casually sleeping with his best friend’s wife, while Sarah Hadland as Alice, the unfaithful but guilt-ridden wife, ties herself in knots trying to ensure that her husband, Paul, played mandarin-like by Ardal O’Hanlon, doesn’t find out about her affair. Meanwhile, Laurence, the wife of the philanderer, Janie Dee, is deliciously cool in the face of her husband’s obvious prevarications, and extracts her own revenge.

The dialogue is stilted, not one of Hampton’s better translations, and the audience can see what’s coming long before it comes. The plot is increasingly preposterous, especially when Michel is in a hotel room with his mistress, attempting to impersonate the elderly aunt who is her alibi on the telephone with her husband.

The most believable scenes are those between Stephen Mangan and Janie Dee although here again Zeller signals each revelation in advance. There is little question as to who is telling The Truth of the title - nobody.
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In the interest of full disclosure I have to point to a full audience which found this modern-day farce hilarious and cheered loudly at the end.

Thank you all for being Theatrewise readers; you can’t imagine how much you mean to me. And for any of you who haven’t yet started reading Backgrounders, today would be a great day for you to type your email address into the box. Paid Subscribers, your Backgrounder will drop into your Inbox on August 5th (or as soon as I’ve finished writing it)!!!

Have a great week and stay away from France and Spain. Love from Ruth

GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO RUTH LEON’S THEATREWISE

Greetings from London where the heatwave has calmed to regular summer. It’s now possible again to walk in the Parks where the flowers are in full bloom and the air doesn’t asphyxiate you as it did last week.

High summer really is the best time to visit England and that advice seems to have been taken on board by the entire populations of the US, Canada, Japan and Europe who all seem to be here. London transportation, buses and subways, seems to be taking a holiday too as the poor tourists are as confused as Londoners by the interrupted bus routes and incomprehensible train schedules. They seem cheerful, though, now that we can breathe again, and don’t appear to mind the endless waits at bus stops for buses that have been mysteriously cancelled, delayed and diverted.

When I turned my attention to Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise this week, the purist in me was craving an old-fashioned concert of classical performances without the trimmings. I settled on a Bach Double Violin Concerto played by two of the greatest violinists in history, Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh. I watched it twice and will go back to wallow in it again. That’s the blessing of online performances: you can watch them again and again and even pause to appreciate the artistry or to make a cup of tea.

As contrast, there’s A Leap Into The Blue (Un saut dans la bleu), a contemporary ballet by the American choreographer and poet Carolyn Carlson from Toulouse, and a lovely little film from the National Gallery about one of the most intriguing paintings of all – The Andolfini Portrait.

It’s the anniversary of one of the greatest of all jazz singers, Billie Holiday, who died at 44 after a life destroyed by alcohol, drugs and her disastrous taste in men, but who left a legacy of recordings which will never die. Arena made a fine documentary about her which contains loving and thoughtful comments from those who knew her and, most precious of all, a lot of her singing.

All these are available by clicking the links beneath the pictures. The concert and ballet require a payment to Medici unless you already have a subscription.

As it has cooled down a bit, I managed to get to the theatre this week and have included some Pocket Reviews below.

The Late Great Billie Holiday aka ‘Lady Day’

Click here to watch

Billie Holiday died on this day 67 years ago. She was only 44 years old. Hers was a voice and musical sensibility that was unique, unquantifiable, unqualifiable. In a world where so many singers sound alike, the sound of Billie Holiday is still arresting and immediately identifiable.

Billie Holiday, nicknamed Lady Day by her friend Lester Young (she nicknamed him Prez), was like noone else. This Arena documentary from 1984 tells her story and hears her voice. It features interviews with those who knew and worked with her, including Artie Shaw, Milt Hinton, John Hammond, Leonard Feather and her faithful maid and later secretary, Alice Vrbsky.

Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh play Bach's Double Violin Concerto

Click here for Medici

Two legends pay tribute to Bach.

"The fact of both having Jewish and Russian origins meant we shared the same musical language," said Yehudi Menuhin when talking about his friend and fellow musician David Oistrakh. "I didn't speak Russian, he didn't speak English, but we communicated in a sort of German dialect.”

A friendship that withstood the Iron Curtain was born in 1945 between the American from New York and the Russian from Odessa. That year, Menuhin was invited by the Soviet government and flew to Moscow. Upon his arrival, Oistrakh was there to greet him.

"From that day on," recalls Menuhin, "and until his death in 1974, we never stopped playing together, Bach's Double Violin Concerto or Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante. He would conduct the Beethoven Concerto for me and I would conduct the Brahms Concerto or vice versa. He was a prince, the best colleague I ever had."

Oistrakh's phenomenal mastery of the instrument and musical integrity was shared by Menuhin in a spirit of friendship, as expressed in the glances exchanged between them in this Double Violin Concerto by Bach, filmed in the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1958, with the RTF Chamber Orchestra conducted by Pierre Capdevielle.

Their friendship and musical intelligence pervades this dazzling concert.

A closer look at 'The Arnolfini Portrait' - National Gallery

Click here to watch

This must be one of the most famous and intriguing paintings in the world.

The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck’s jewel-like masterpiece, was created in 1434. A richly dressed man and woman stand in a private room. They are probably Giovanni di Nicolao di Arnolfini, an Italian merchant working in Bruges, and his wife.

Although the room is totally plausible – as if Jan van Eyck had simply removed a wall – close examination reveals inconsistencies: there’s not enough space for the chandelier, and no sign of a fireplace. Moreover, every object has been carefully chosen to proclaim the couple’s wealth and social status without risking criticism for aping the aristocracy.

The man’s hand is raised, apparently in greeting. On the back wall, a large convex mirror reflects two men coming into the room, one of whom also raises his arm. Immediately above it is Van Eyck’s signature. Could the man in mirror be van Eyck himself, with his servant, coming on a visit?

Here is a short film that delves into each intricate detail and discovers van Eyck’s groundbreaking technique. The film was made for a recent National Gallery exhibition.

I had always understood that the wife in this delicate work of art was pregnant and that this was a painting made to celebrate the couple’s first long-awaited child. Not at all. It turns out that Mrs. Arnolfini died the year before van Eyck created this painting. The painting is therefore now believed to be a memorial, commissioned by Mr. Arnolfini to the memory of his late wife. Memorial portraits of the dead with the living were apparently not unusual at that time.

Other scholars have made observations about the symbolism of the painting. For example, Mr. Arnolfini stands by an open window looking out onto the world of the living. She stands before a bed, a symbol of sleep and repose. He stands underneath a lit candle, a symbol of the living. She stands under a candle stub that has gone out, a symbol of death.

Another scholar speculates that the mirror in the background is surrounded by scenes of the life of Christ. Those on the left side, where Mr. Arnolfini stands, depict His life and miracles. Those on the right side, behind Mrs. Arnolfini, depict His passion and death.

The National Gallery dismisses much of this speculation and concentrates here on the artistry of Van Eyck. Whether or not it is a memorial is left to the viewer to decide.

Un saut dans le bleu - Ballet de l’Opéra national du Capitole

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In Un saut dans le bleu (“A leap into the blue”), choreographer Carolyn Carlson draws on over 50 years of experience and her own brand of spiritually profound, visually powerful choreography to bring to life an original score by French composer Pierre Le Bourgeois.

Having created more than 100 works — art that she describes as “visual poetry” — Carlson breathes originality into each piece, exploring new concepts and inspirations.

Un saut dans le bleu follows her poetry collection of the same name which blends melancholic, nostalgic imagery with philosophical insights on human existence.

Self-defined as an “image maker,” Carlson now brings her poetic vision to life in this work of abstract lyricism, boundless creativity, and intimate meditation on what it is to be human.

POCKET REVIEWS

Wife to James Whelan – Jermyn Street Theatre

It’s easy to see why Teresa Deevy, the playwright of Wife to James Whelan, has been hailed as the Irish Chekhov. As in almost all of Chekhov, Deevy’s affecting drama is about people who are all in love with the wrong person.

Set in a small town in the West of Ireland in 1930, love, ambition, and the possibility of marriage preoccupies its young people.
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When we meet them all the boys in town are competing for the same job in Dublin and they are all in love with Nan (Cliona Flynn) who has eyes only for James Whelan. James (Fiach Kunz) is a cocky and ambitious young man who, having been selected for the job, tries to persuade Nan to wait for him. In a misplaced display of power, she attempts to persuade him to stay in their backwater town. He loves her but his ambition wins. Out of pique, she takes up with another of her suitors and marries him instead.

Seven years later, James, still unmarried, is rich and the owner of a prosperous bus company. All the young men who were his friends back in the village now work for him and Kate, a friend from childhood, is carrying a torch for him. Nan, now a destitute widow with a child to support, turns up in his office and begs him for work. Now James needs a wife and Nora, the daughter of his former boss, seems like the perfect choice. But Nan is back. And Kate still wants him. And everybody still wants Nan. What is he going to do?

Yes, shades of The Cherry Orchard and, in parts, Three Sisters.

Teresa Deevy was a favourite of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin until they turned down this play. Perhaps the sexual tension and the combined heat of Irish characters on the brink of a modern world flexing their newly discovered ambitions, proved too incendiary for the Abbey in 1937 but it’s impossible to understand why this remarkable play disappeared and was unproduced until the Mint Theatre in New York discovered it in 2010.

The tiny playing area of the Jermyn Street Theatre hosts a cast of eight Irish actors, led by Fiach Kunz as a proud but tortured James, each of whom would grace a West End stage with distinction. The director, Jonathan Bank, who also directed it in New York, has gathered a cast who all have credits from the Abbey or the Gate. They do him, and the play, credit.

No, Teresa Deevy is not Chekhov and we do her a disservice by making the comparison, because she is more than worthy of her own reputation as an Irish playwright whose specificity of time, place, and plot detracts not at all from its universality. In that, as with Chekhov, she is a playwriting gem.

Allegra - Harold Pinter Theatre

Wednesday matinees exist only for your granny to have her afternoon nap in the company of a good (or bad) play. But here’s something I never thought I’d see: a sold out, grey-haired crowd in a West End theatre all singing a rousing version of ‘Take Me Out To The Ballgame’. Who on earth could persuade staid standoffish English theatregoers to such a bizarre act on a sweltering Wednesday afternoon in London?

Only Maureen Lipman, who must be fed up to the teeth with being described as “a force of nature” or “a national treasure” but who is both, along with being a superb actor with dazzling technique and the ability to play comedy, drama, history and musicals with the same audience-friendly projection that suggests she’s making it up as she’s going along. She’s not.

She recently performed Rose, Martin Sherman’s searing one-woman drama about an elderly Holocaust survivor matter-of-factly describing what happened to her, which had whole audiences weeping.

This brilliant actor has earned the right to do anything she pleases and what pleases her, and us, right now is Allegra, a charming fantasy at the Pinter Theatre. Allegra is an endearing and very funny lady who breaks into song wherever and whenever she thinks people need a song - in the library, in the butchers, in the street. This apparently harmless habit gets her into trouble with the law. It also allows Lipman, an accomplished musical theatre actor, to sing some well-known songs as a daffy old lady and even tap dance a bit.

Lipman, or rather Allegra, is well supported in this singing and dancing extravanganza by Elizabeth Bower as her Czech cleaner and John Middleton as her put upon brother. Bailey Patrick does a turn as an exasperated local policeman.

If you look beneath the surface, (and why would you when you’re having such a good time?) Allegra is a clever comedy by Peter Quilter, directed and choreographed by Stephen Mear, about positivity and the freedom to live and behave as you wish in a world bounded by too many conventions.
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After all, who wouldn’t want to sing out loud in a crowded theatre on a hot Wednesday? I did.

Free Subscribers, please come back next week for more arts online. Paid Subscribers, thank you for your enthusiasm for the July Backgrounder-Marlon Brando and for your excellent suggestions for next month. If you haven’t already joined the Backgrounder gang, please type your email into the box below now.

Enjoy the summer weather, see you next week. Love, Ruth

GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO RUTH LEON’S THEATREWISE

Wimbledon’s over for another year. Sigh. And the heatwave seems to be receding. No more excuses. Back to work.

One compensation is the annual gift that goes on giving, the Proms. For readers who don’t live in London or who don’t plan on visiting soon, the Proms, or to give them their correct name, The BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, are one of the glories of the English summer. London music-lovers and regular visitors devour the advance schedule as soon as it is published and often plan their summer around the concerts they don’t want to miss.

Robert Newman founded the Proms with the aim of bringing the best in classical music to the widest possible audience. Henry Wood, who conducted almost every concert for nearly half a century, lifted his baton for the first time on Saturday 10 August 1895.

Running from this Friday, July 17, every night until September 12, the Proms are a massive eight-week summer classical music festival held in the Royal Albert Hall. Since 1927, the BBC has organised and broadcast the Proms. All concerts are broadcast on BBC Radio and many are also available on television, on BBC Iplayer and on BBC Sounds.

The range of music is enormous and the tickets are cheap, especially for the proud ‘Prommers’ who stand up in the centre of the arena and gallery for the whole concert.

Browse the programme for the Proms ’26 to see the smorgasbord of music to be included this year. There’s also an archive which allows you to delve into the history of performances since 1895.
(https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/proms/bbc-proms-2026#e11457)

I’ve chosen a concert from the archives to include in this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise. It’s a spirited history of jazz from the National Youth Jazz Orchestra with their guest star Dee Dee Bridgewater which was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 2023.

Also this week there’s The Taming of the Shrew but not as you know it. It’s a ballet adaptation, originally choreographed for the Bolshoi and here performed by the Ballets de Monte-Carlo.

From the National Gallery in London comes a short, sharp look at Renoir’s ‘Umbrellas’ from one of the Gallery’s knowledgable art historians. You’ll never look at this painting the same way again.

To celebrate the 45^th birthday of one of the world’s leading sopranos, Asmik Grigorian, here she is in the title role of Dvorak’s most famous opera, Rusalka.

Last week I promised you Maxim Gorky’s razor-sharp portrait of class, privilege and denial, Summerfolk. This is a recent production from the National Theatre and I noted that Gorky is definitely overdue for rediscovery. Then I inadvertently left it out of the final line-up of last week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise. Apologies for the omission. Here it is.

All these are available by clicking the links beneath the pictures. Several this week come via Medici. Do subscribe if you haven’t done so already as I come back to this irreplaceable website week after week and one subscription will keep you viewing for an entire year.

Summerfolk – National Theatre

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It’s a hot, beautiful summer in 1905, and Russia’s elite retreat to the countryside to swim, sip champagne and start affairs. As the party continues, how long can they ignore the storm on the horizon? This is Summerfolk, Maxim Gorky’s razor-sharp portrait of class, privilege and denial.

Maxim Gorky was a Russian Socialist who was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He opposed the Tsarist regime and was closely associated with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. During World War 1, Gorky supported pacifism and internationalism and anti-war protests.

For much of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union, having become critical both of Tsarism and of the Bolsheviks, but in 1928 he returned to the USSR at Stalin's invitation and lived there until his death in June 1936.
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During that time he tried to soften Soviet cultural policies and defended writers who disobeyed them. Consequently he spent his last days under unannounced house arrest. His friends included Chekhov and Tolstoy.

Robert Hastie directs Summerfolk, in a new adaptation by Nina Raine and Moses Raine at the National Theatre.

Renoir’s 'Umbrellas': Glimpses of Parisian Life

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s ‘Les Parapluies’ (’The Umbrellas’) was first shown at an Impressionist exhibition in New York in 1886, 130 years ago this week.

Look carefully at the crowd beneath their brollies. Observe how their hands and feet intertwine in the composition of bright oranges, blues and greens. What do you think the expressions of the young woman and little girl, looking out at us from the picture, are saying?

And why do you think there are two different styles of women’s clothes in the picture, alert as Renoir was to women’s fashions of the day? National Gallery Educator, Belle Smith, shows us a rainy day in Paris as we haven’t examined it before.

Renoir began the painting in about 1880–81, using the loose brushwork with dark and bright tones typical of the Impressionist movement. In about 1885, after losing his attachment to Impressionism and drawing inspiration from classical art he had seen in Italy, and the works of Ingres and Cézanne, he reworked parts of the painting, particularly the principal female figure to the left of the frame, in a more classical linear style using more muted colours, and added the background and the umbrellas themselves.

X-ray photography has shown that the clothing of the female figure was originally different: she wore a hat and her dress had horizontal rows of frills, with white lace at its cuffs and collar, suggesting that she was middle class, whereas the simpler clothes in the revised painting mark her out as a member of the working class. The X-ray analysis and then the changing fashions allow the periods of work to be dated with reasonable accuracy.

Dvorak’s Rusalka – Royal Opera

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Rusalka is Antonin Dvorak’s best-known and most frequently performed opera and is now part of the standard repertoire of opera houses thoughout the world. This production from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is a showcase for the opera superstar Asmik Grigorian performing one of the most coveted of all soprano roles, the nymph Rusalka.

At a forest lake, she falls in love with a human prince, sacrificing her voice and immortality to be with him. Now a stranger among humans, unable to speak, she realizes that the person for whom she gave up everything is unfaithful and unworthy of her sacrifice.

Under the musical direction of Semyon Bychkov, with an astonishing Grigorian in the title role, Natalie Abrahami and Ann Yee's poetic contemporary staging highlights the ecological and feminist undertones of Antonín Dvořák’s opera in which the quest for love and the loss of identity remain tragically intertwined. Rusalka features the famous aria, "Song to the Moon".

The Taming of the Shrew - Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo

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This is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew by choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot set to an inventive score drawn from the music of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Here is the familiar story of Katharina, a strong willed-woman, and Petruchio, the knight who ventures to conquer her independence. The ballet explores the clashes between the protagonists and their suitors, set against a backdrop where social conventions and power struggles collide with the force of human passions.

This ballet was created for the Bolshoi in 2014 and revived here by the Ballets de Monte-Carlo. The narrative draws on both Shakespeare’s irony and gravitas while emphasizing the search for self and true love. Through striking set design and a choreographic language that blends classical virtuosity with modern expression, the ballet offers a reading of the romantic myth that is at once funny, sensual, and profoundly human.

Dee Dee Bridgewater with The National Youth Jazz Orchestra

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Seeing it’s Proms season, I thought it would be fun to enjoy a Proms programme that is not classical, but jazz. Here is the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and their guest star Dee Dee Bridgwater at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

From its roots in New Orleans to the heyday of swing, the programme highlights the stylistic richness and vitality of jazz traditions. Well known music by Duke Ellington and Mongo Santamaria interact with more contemporary compositions, demonstrating jazz’s constant reinvention and showcasing the excellent young musicians in NYJO.

This evening at the Proms features Dee Dee Bridgewater, a major figure in vocal jazz. Heir to a tradition that she perpetuates with energy and modernity, Bridgewater brings her voice and charisma to this concert celebrating live jazz. A vibrant encounter between generations and eras not to be missed.

Thank you for joining me for this week’s Theatrewise. Please come back next week for more. And, Paid Subscribers, I still don’t have a subject for August’s Backgrounder so, please, give me your suggestions asap and, if you want to weigh in and haven’t joined the ranks yet, please do so now in the box below.

Have a good week and stay cool.

GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO RUTH LEON’S THEATREWISE

I’m not the type to faint. I think of myself as intrepid and adaptable, able to shoulder any discomfort in pursuit of a perfect play or concert. Or cabaret or art exhibition. Even one that’s less than perfect. Thus, you will be surprised that this robust specimen of a New Yorker/Londoner is cancelling all her events this week (three plays and a concert) and hunkering down, blinds drawn, in a cool apartment until summer becomes, well, summer again, not this maelstrom of discomfort otherwise known as a heatwave.

Those of you not in London will scoff, I suspect, but then, you’ve never experienced the sheer hell of a London tube/subway train in the rush hour (it’s always rush hour on the way to the theatre) or the claustrophobia of an unairconditioned London bus in the temperatures we are currently experiencing. When I tell you that very few cabs or Ubers are airconditioned and that very few theatres have any but the most rudimentary cooling systems, you might be sympathetic to our plight here in the capitol of the arts world.

This is when the joy of the arts online is most welcome. I would never encourage you not to go to the live theatre but, honestly, this week, on this side of the Atlantic, and that, is a brilliant time to stay home and click on the links beneath the pictures on Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise.

You won’t regret it. I’ve given you lots of treats to explore this week. Maxim Gorky’s razor-sharp portrait of class, privilege and denial, Summerfolk, will become available from tomorrow from the National Theatre (airconditioning there is iffy, at best) and Gorky is definitely overdue for rediscovery.

If modern ballet is your pleasure in this season when there isn’t any at the Royal Opera House, do take a look at the 5 Ballets By Hans Van Manen from the Palace of Versailles, performed by the Dutch Royal Ballet.

A whole evening of Rodgers and Hammerstein hits is on offer in an 80^th anniversary concert from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. And there’s an introduction to the new exhibition at the Met Museum in New York. Called Musical Bodies, it examines the connections between humans and instruments with a guided tour from the curators who put it together.

Now that I’m back from the United States where I absorbed as much music as I could, I returned to my usual beat in the live theatre this week and reviewed two new productions – Springwood at Hampstead Theatre and Sinatra The Musical at the Aldwych.

All but the live theatre productions are available just by clicking on the links beneath the pictures. You can stay home with a cool drink and enjoy every moment without having to go out at all.

​My Favourite Things – Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 80th Anniversary Concert

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Directed and choreographed by Tony Award-winner Christopher Gattelli at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, this celebration of the historic partnership of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II showcases original arrangements of the famous songs from Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Cinderella and The Sound of Music, along with beloved treasures from musicals such as Allegro, Flower Drum Song, and State Fair.

This landmark event features the 40-piece Rodgers & Hammerstein Concert Orchestra, conducted by Simon Lee, along with a West End chamber choir, dance ensemble and appearances by stars such as Audra McDonald, Aaron Tveit, and more.

Musical Bodies – Met Museum

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From clapping hands and tapping feet to beatboxing and whistling, the human body is a musical instrument. Musical instruments, in turn, often draw their form and decoration from our bodies. Around the world and across time, instruments emerge as powerful vehicles that represent our voices, actions, and identity not only in music but throughout the visual arts, literature, religion, pop culture, and mythology.

Here is a virtual tour of the latest exhibition at the Met Museum, Musical Bodies. Musical Bodies is the first major exhibition to explore the relationship between musical instruments and the body by bringing together some 130 instruments, paintings, sculptures, drawings, and more, to illuminate how we express who we are, what we value, and what we believe.

With works from The Met collection and institutions and collectors around the world, the exhibition explores 4,000 years of art and music history, from ancient Egyptian rattles and musical masterpieces by Titian and Degas to instrument-inspired apparel and one of Prince's most notable guitars.

Musical Bodies will resonate with visitors of all ages, whether you are a musician, a devoted listener, or simply curious about human expression.

Five ballets by Hans van Manen — Dutch National Ballet

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At Paris's magnificent Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the Dutch National Ballet presents an exceptional evening of dance to honor the legacy of the late Hans van Manen, one of the great neoclassical choreographers of the 20th century.

Over the course of his long career, Manen created over 100 ballets, many specifically for the Dutch National Ballet, including the five gems performed in this tribute.

Featuring music by Bach, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten, Arvo Pärt, Erkki-Sven Tüür, and Ástor Piazzolla, Manen’s five masterpieces showcase a variety of evocative dance styles and the full gamut of human emotions.

From a spirited three-part solo dance set to Bach’s Violin Partita No. 1 to a rousing, tango-inspired piece soundtracked by Piazzolla’s Five Tango Sensations, this rich ballet medley has everything to delight fans of music and dance alike.

They include: Adagio Hammerklavier (1973), Solo (1997), Frank Bridge Variations (2005), Two Pieces for Het (1997), 5 Tangos (1977)

POCKET REVIEWS

Springwood – Hampstead Theatre

When King Charles and Queen Camilla visited the United States earlier this year, I thought it was a mistake. President Trump had been on a tear, insulting the UK, insulting the Prime Minister personally, insulting Europe as a whole. Why, I asked, should he be honoured with a Royal visit in the face of his obvious and declared contempt for our country?

As we now know, I was wrong (and not for the first time) because the visit was a triumph. He made two brilliant speeches, one at a State Dinner in his honour and another to a Joint Session of Congress, in which he skewered all Trumps’ favourite issues – the environment, multi-culturalism, discrimination, etc – without Trump, apparently, understanding that he’d been insulted.

In another part of the forest, American playwright Richard Nelson has written and directed a delicate and intelligent play about another Royal visit, that of King George V1 and Queen Elizabeth, (no, not that one, her mother) to the country home of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, the redoubtable Eleanor, in 1930. The trip was what we today call ‘soft power’, an effort to persuade Roosevelt to help Britain when, as was inevitable, it was attacked by Germany. To that extent, it didn’t work and the US didn’t come into the war until it was itself attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour, but it was a good meeting, one that gave rise to an enduring friendship between the two men.

What they had in common was a disability. For Roosevelt it was his life as a polio victim confined to a wheelchair, a fact never reported in his lifetime but known to everybody. For the King it was a crippling stutter which made him appear slow and stupid.

Nelson’s play gives both men and their very different wives the space to establish a believable relationship which would undoubtedly ease the way through the War and give them each someone to talk to when the pressures of leadership felt too burdensome.

Both Robert Lindsay and Andrew Havill give human faces to our pictures of Roosevelt and the King, who bond over late-night drinking sessions and stamp-collecting, although Jemma Redgrave as Eleanor finds it tougher to humanise a woman who scandalised the Queen with her living arrangements. Rebecca Night is a fussy Queen and Rachel Pickup implausible as Roosvelt’s long time mistress.

But Springwood is an absorbing evening, one in which the process of ‘soft power’ is admirably explained as a way for countries to achieve closer understanding.

Sinatra The Musical – Aldwych Theatre

Do you like Sinatra? Of course you do. Everybody does. And there’s a new West End show called Sinatra The Musical just for you. Two and a half hours of Fly Me to the Moon and Come Fly With Me and You Make Me Feel So Young and (nearly) all the others, some 28 songs in all, to make you feel so young too.

Here’s the stage equivalent of a biopic, the story of the life of the Italian-American Francis Albert from Hoboken, New Jersey, whose exquisite phrasing and voice of molten melody captured the world and still sells a ton of recordings worldwide, though he’s been dead for nearly 30 years.

This show covers ten years of important moments in his life. He was a good boy, a bad boy, a good boy again. Two wives (there were two more later but the show doesn’t get to them), three children, an immensity of recordings, and stardom at an iconic level.

Sinatra The Musical features an unknown singer, one Joel Harper Jackson, as Sinatra. Lovely voice, and he looks quite like him but, let’s face it, nobody’s Sinatra but Sinatra. Phoebe Panaretos is fine as first wife, Nancy, and Ana Villafane is okay as second wife, Ava Gardner, but I’d have liked a lot more of Jenna Russell as his mother, Dolly. She definitely deserves a song of her own.

The script, by the usually reliable Joe DiPietro, is dire. I can only assume that his original draft was too long and someone else cut it heedlessly to make it fit.

A big cast includes a full chorus and numerous cameo appearances from the likes of Lana Turner, Billie Holiday and Gene Kelly, performed by members of the ensemble. Kathleen Marshall’s choreography is, as ever, excellent, although, as director, she drops several balls. Jon Morrell's period costumes are spot on. I wish I could say the same for the sound. On the night I saw the show, some crescendos were so distorted that I, and many other audience members had to cover our ears.

There’s lots here to please a die-hard Sinatra fan, the summer tourists will love it – no language barrier – and there is every possibility that Sinatra The Musical could be a longterm crowd pleaser.

Many thanks to my wonderful Paid Subscribers for your enthusiasm for this month’s Backgrounder - Marlon Brando. Anyone who missed it can still make up for it by typing your email into the box below. And thank you for being here. I hope you will all come back next week for more arts online. Stay cool.

It was a rotten childhood. His father was a tyrant, his mother was a drunk. Marlon was a cut-up. He’d stand directly in front of his mother and do funny voices and animal imitations to stop her taking the next drink. It didn’t work.

At school he was a talented musician and excellent at sports. But he turned up late or not at all, disrupted classes with silly pranks and delighted in cruel practical jokes, a habit that continued into adulthood. Expelled for repeated misbehaviour, his father sent him to a military academy where he rebelled even more at any hint of authority. Expelled for insubordination, he dropped out and, aged 18, with $300 in his pocket, he set off for New York to be an actor.

His sister Jocelyn was already there and she remembered, “He was in a school play and enjoyed it ... So he decided he would go to New York and study acting because that was the only thing he had enjoyed.”

From this unprepossessing beginning Marlon Brando became one of the greatest and most influential actors in the history of cinema.

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I’m so glad to be back in London for the start of my favourite fortnight of the year; Wimbledon starts today. The appalling heat of recent days seems to have abated somewhat. This means that those brave and beautiful athletes who have developed bodies that nature never intended, get to compete on the greenest of green grass, wearing the whitest of white outfits without, hopefully, succumbing to temperatures that would fell the hardiest ox.

I used to go to SW19 (Wimbledon’s zipcode) every year until the ticket prices rose too high, as did the locations of seats available to regular folk. The good seats are owned by corporations and share-holders, putting them doubly out of reach. But the BBC’s coverage is brilliant, broadcasting every single match on every single one of the 19 courts so, please don’t talk to me for the next two weeks. I’ll be hunkered down in front of multiple screens, eating strawberries.

But I haven’t forgotten you. This Grand Slam doesn’t have night matches, although occasionally the 5-set format means they sometimes continue from afternoon into evening. I can write next week’s newsletter at night.

On this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise, written before Wimbledon started, I’m paying tribute to Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence which has its 250^th anniversary on July 4^th.

Even celebrating her birthday this week is a triumph for the redoubtable Tracey Emin who has battled life-threatening illnesses to still be making art in a variety of media. Here is a fine BBC biopic which documents a life lived entirely on her own terms.

Another artist who has survived on her own terms is Debbie Harry of Blondie, that punk era of music I never paid much attention to when it was big but turns out to be much longer lasting that you might have thought.

Here too is a Pocket Review of the new play at the Lyric, Hammersmith, Relics.

And Marlon Brando, considered by many to be the greatest actor in film history, died 22 years ago this week on July 1, 2004, aged 80. More on him later.

You can enjoy all these just by clicking on the links beneath the pictures. Me? I’m off to watch tennis.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson - 3rd President of the United States Documentary - YouTube

Thomas Jefferson had the good sense to die on July 4th, 200 years ago this week, on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the declaration that he himself had drafted.

As a foreigner who has lived in the United States for more than 50 years, I have been shocked to discover that even well-educated Americans are ignorant of more than the sketchiest of details about how that Declaration came about, who was responsible for it, who signed it, and, beyond providing the framework for the 13 American colonies to separate from Britain, what were its lasting effects.

On this important anniversary, I set out to find a documentary that would tell in clear terms the story of Thomas Jefferson and the history leading up to the signature of his Declaration and beyond. Here it is, a bit dry and academic, but full of information.

We have come so far from that signing that it is worth reminding ourselves, Brits and Americans, what was, and still is, at stake and what Thomas Jefferson and those other brave founders, wanted for those who would come after them.

Debbie Harry – One Way or Another

Blondie: One Way or Another (2006) BBC Documentary - YouTube

I never really ‘got’ Blondie or punk rock when I was the right age to appreciate them but this excellent documentary from the BBC has made me a fan.

Debbie Harry was born 81 years ago today. Best known as the lead vocalist of the band Blondie, she is an American singer, songwriter and actress. Four of her songs with the band reached No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 between 1979 and 1981.

It was a febrile time. This little white girl from the New York suburbs wanted something different from her conventional white bread background so, at the age of 13, she took the train to the big city and found it in the slums of the West Village.

The bands, the ones I wasn’t interested in at the time, who became famous, like Blondie, flourished in grotty downtown clubs surrounded by litter and dog shit, in the lofts and back streets of New York, until, inevitably, someone heard them.

More to the point, they saw Debbie Harry. She was more than a punk chick, she was beautiful and sexy and she could sing, sort of. The rest is history.

Marlon Brando

I Coulda Been a Contender - On the Waterfront (6/8) Movie CLIP (1954) HD

Marlon Brando, considered by many to be the greatest actor in film history, died 22 years ago this week on July 1, 2004, aged 80.

He was a complicated man who despised the movie industry that made him a star and identified with many social and political causes that he considered more important than acting in movies. He had at least 11 children, possibly 17, 3 wives, dozens of lovers and was nominated 7 times for Academy Awards. Here's just a taster of what he could do.

If you want to know more, I’m afraid you’ll have to become a Paid Subscriber, fast, as this month’s Backgrounder is all about Marlon Brando.

As always, It will drop into the Paid Subscribers' Inboxes on the first Wednesday in the month which happens to be this Wednesday, July 1.

Tracey Emin - Where Do You Draw the Line?

imagine: Tracey Emin - Where Do You Draw the Line? (BBC)

Dame Tracey Emin was born 63 years ago on Friday and, despite several life-threatening illnesses, continues to make art in many different formats.

2018 was an extraordinary year for British artist Tracey Emin. With large-scale commissions catapulting her from London's St Pancras station to the streets of downtown Sydney - only pausing for breath with exhibitions in Hong Kong and Brussels along the way - she has proven yet again that she packs a punch like no other.

But as she turned 55 and entered what she likes to call the 'last stage' of her life, the BBC considered it was time for a more mature, reflective Tracey. Following the death of her mother in 2016, she decided to return to her home town of Margate and convert a derelict printworks there into a new studio where she could live and make art.

A BBC team spent 12 months following Tracey at home and abroad in a bid to chart her creative process at work. She tells Alan Yentob about her life to date, from her troubled early years in Margate to a series of breakthroughs in the 1990s as a leading light of the Young British Artists, featuring career-defining work like My Bed and her embroidered tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995.

With contributors including Sir Nicholas Serota, Jay Jopling, Maria Balshaw and David Dawson, this is the definitive account of one of Britain's most famous and infamous artists.

Since this documentary was made, Tracey has been made a Dame, received many awards, and suffered a life-threatening illness - squamous-cell bladder cancer. She underwent an operation to remove her bladder and several adjacent organs, a radical cystectomy and full hysterectomy in 2020 and has subsequently suffered several more serious illnesses.

​All this would have felled a less determined woman but not Tracey. She still works without let-up and has returned to drawing and painting, the first loves of her artistic life.

POCKET REVIEW

Relics – Lyric Theatre Hammersmith

Returning from California where I took a break from theatre to concentrate on music, I’m now firmly back on my usual beat and glad to be sitting in my usual seat trying to make sense of the glorious miscellany that is London theatre. To that end, I took myself to Hammersmith on the hottest night of the year (so far) to see Relics.

Relics is a well-constructed comedy/drama by Ben Ockrent with a first-class cast, directed by the always interesting Michael Longhurst in a living room set by Joanna Scotcher that evokes the time, the place, and the people who lived in it.

I’ve seen this new play before, many times. As recently as last year something very like it won multiple Tonys on Broadway for Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a play in which a family gathers in their late father's home to go through his belongings, where they discover a shocking secret.

Relics is yet another play with the timeworn plot of siblings returning to the family home after the death of a parent to distribute the remaining objects amongst themselves. One wants the old piano, remembering childhood music lessons. Another wants mother’s bed because his new flat is unfurnished. Another wants Grandad’s medals. So far so good until.....one sibling requests ownership of an object that none of them likes, a painting that hung in their mother’s bedroom. Why does he want it?

The ensuing argument about the painting’s provenance then opens the sometimes loving, sometimes irritable, sometimes ferocious forensic examination of the bonds between siblings. There are four of them, well played by Charly Clive, JJ Field, Sally Phillips and Sam Swainsbury as they expose the faultlines of belief, integrity, habit and resentment that develop in any family.

Relics is what we all say we want – a good, solid, wellmade new play with many welcome laughs and characters we can believe in.
Why, then, does it feel like a retread?

Thank you for sharing Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise again this week. Please come back next Monday for more arts online.

On Wednesday, this week, Paid Subscribers’ patience is rewarded. Into their Inboxes will drop July’s Backgrounder. It’s about Marlon Brando and there’s much to tell. If you aren’t already part of the gang, please type your email into the box below.

Back in London last night and not a second too soon after a US trip lasting two and a half months. I had to come home because I’ve run out of everything; all the necessities in those tiny bottles that fit into my carryon have been used to the last drop.

Having stayed with diverse hospitable friends all over California and Washington DC, I am familiar with where they keep things. I know where their teabags are and how to operate their microwaves and what to do to avoid setting off their alarm systems. Trouble is, I’ve been away so long that I can’t remember how my microwave works or where I keep the damn teabags. And I’m so dozy from the sleepless overnight flight that I haven’t got the energy to search. It’s been a wonderful trip, I enjoyed every moment of it, and I expect I’ll find the teabags by tomorrow.

I’m sure you heard that David Hockney died last week, that most colourful and optimistic of artists. I couldn’t let him pass without including at least one of his myriad contributions to our lives. Here is Turandot from the San Francisco Opera which he designed.

I heard this week that at the last minute the city of Vienna has withdrawn its $250,000 funding for the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual free, open air summer concert at the Schonbrunn Palace. Fortunately, private money came to the rescue, the concert took place as scheduled and it’s here for you on Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise. But is this the last of these spectacular events?

Having indulged myself with a fantastic week in San Francisco where I went to the Opera, twice, went to the Symphony, twice, and wallowed in the magical exhibition of Monet and Venice at the De Young Museum, I then spent a wonderful week in a beautiful little town halfway down California called Ojai.

There I discovered the 80-year old Ojai Music Festival, which is devoted to the performance of contemporary concert music. I had always wanted to get to Ojai, especially as I have great friends who live there, but the dates never worked out before. It was worth the wait.

And, just because I was in America, despite all the dreadful things that are happening politically, and because I still love it, here’s a reminder of how glorious it can be - “America” from the 1961 movie of West Side Story.

If you don’t already have a subscription to Medici, just follow the instructions on the link to watch the concert from Schonbrunn and the opera. Everything else is free just by clicking the links beneath the pictures.

The 2026 Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert at Schönbrunn Palace

Click here for Medici

Every year, as the days grow longer, Austria gets ready for one of the classical calendar’s highlights: the Vienna Philharmonic’s Summer Night Concert. This event, inaugurated in 2004, brings the prestigious orchestra together with some of the world’s most illustrious soloists — in front of an audience of up to 60,000 — in the gardens of Vienna’s world-famous Schönbrunn Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Lorenzo Viotti conducts the Summer Night Concert for the first time this year. Welsh opera singer Sir Bryn Terfel is the soloist, performing arias from Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele and Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff, as well as the finale from Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold and Tevye’s song from the musical Fiddler on the Roof by Jerry Bock.

To the sounds of Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2, dancers of the Vienna State Ballet bring the ancient tale of the foundlings Daphnis and Chloe to life in a choreography by Eno Peçi, making them visible as “shadow figures” on the palace façade.

Turandot, designed by David Hockney

Click here to watch

David Hockney designed the primary-coloured sets for the San Francisco Opera's stirring production of Puccini's Turandot, libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, with principal roles performed by Eva Marton and Michael Sylvester.

In medieval Beijing, the cruel princess Turandot, in order to avoid marriage, condemns to death all the suitors who can't answer the three riddles she asks them. An Unknown Prince arrives with his guide Liú. Firstly shocked by the princess's cruelty, he falls in love with her. Ignoring his father's advice, the Prince attempts the challenge and succeeds in answering the three enigmas but he sets a challenge of his own. If she can discover his name before dawn he will free her from her commitment.

The Hungarian soprano Eva Marton sings Princess Turandot, one of the most important roles of her career. The power of her voice easily masters the character’s musical nuances, moving flexibly between cruelty, love and torment.

The American tenor Michael Sylvester sings the noble and heroic Prince, and Ping, Pang and Pong are performed by Theodore Baerg, Dennis Petersen and Craig Estep.

David Hockney’s sets are a perfect frame for Ian Falconer’s sumptuous costumes and Thomas Munn's deft lighting transports us into the heart of medieval China.

Ojai Music Festival

Click here to watch
​
There has been a music festival in the jewel-like town of Ojai (California) for 80 years and I spent last week enjoying its latest incarnation. In some ways it resembles other small towns with music festivals – Aspen, Tanglewood – but Ojai is unique in that it is entirely devoted to new concert music and is so well-regarded that many of the distinguished composers come in person to hear their works performed. The ink was hardly dry on some contemporary pieces that were played. Bach got a brief look-in on the final concert but otherwise Stravinsky’s was the oldest work on offer.

Many of this year’s offerings were works by John Adams, the Festival’s former Music Director, and Essa-Pekka Salonin, who was in charge this year. John Adams, as anyone with even a glancing interest in serious music knows, is a Pulitzer-Prizewinner who has composed operas such as The Death of Klinghoffer and Nixon in China as well as multiple orchestral and chamber works, several of which were in the Ojai program.

Essa-Pekka Salonin is the distinguished Finnish conductor, former Music Director of both the LA Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, but, he says, a composer at heart who took up conducting primarily to ensure that someone would conduct his own compositions.

As an audience member who was previously unfamiliar with his work, I found it quite challenging. He also programmed works by two of his own teachers and by Magnus Lindberg, a classmate and fellow composer with whom he formed both a new music appreciation group and an experimental performance group while still a student.

The Ojai Festival was a jam-packed four-day event with concerts and lectures from 8am to late evening and included performances by the Attacca Quartet, violinist Leila Josefowicz, clarinetist Anthony McGill, the LA Dance Project, and the Colburn Orchestra, and, in addition to the new and existing pieces by Salonin and Adams, featured works by Olivier Messiaen, Steven Stucky, Oliver Knussen, Luciano Berio and Kaija Saariaho.

The audience, many of them local residents or regular longtime Festival attendees, were rapt. Even the most difficult music held the attention of a sold-out outdoor concert hall, the Libbey Bowl, and serious conversations about the music occupied the crowd both outside and inside the grounds. I learned a lot.

Here is the final concert of this year’s Ojai Festival. It features a Bach Partita played by violinist Geneva Lewis which leads directly into a Salonin work using it as a jumping off point. Here too is the Gregory Ligeti concerto played by Leila Josefowicz and a rousing perforance of Stravinsky’s Pulcinello, played by the Colburn Orchestra, Salonin conducting.

"America" – West Side Story

Click here to watch

To celebrate the 250th signing of the Declaration of Independence here is "America", one of the greatest numbers in movie musical history. Rita Moreno as Anita, George Chakiris as Bernardo. Choreography by Jerome Robbins, Music by Leonard Bernstein, Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

When the film of West Side Story was released in 1961, movie theater owners all over the United States reported that after this scene, entire audiences of packed houses gave it a standing ovation - something theater owners had never seen before or since.

Thanks to all of you who sent such lovely comments about Theatrewise while I was in the States. I read them all but computer problems made it difficult to respond to everybody.

Paid Subscribers, thank you for the suggestions for next month’s Backgrounder. I’ve already started researching Marlon Brando, a great actor and an unusual man. If you haven’t yet signed up for Backgrounders, please do so today via the box below.

I do no promotion or advertising. All of you came to Theatrewise via recommendations so please pass it on to your arts-loving friends and ask them to join your gang.

And thank you all for being here and coming back every week for more arts online. Love, Ruth

GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO RUTH LEON’S THEATREWISE

I’m still in California, down in the more Southern bit now, attending the Ojai Music Festival. More on this next week. I’m staying with friends who have a fabulous garden with cactuses of every size and shape, even flowering ones and this one, as big as a tree.

Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise is nearly all women this week, with Fred Astaire creeping in at the end but only because he’s dancing with Cyd Charisse. I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened. The number of women painters who have earned their living by their art is vanishingly small and this week I’m paying tribute to two of them, hundreds of years apart – Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Cassatte.

Similarly, very few major arts organisations are headed by women and I’ve loved getting to know the work of two conductors who are now leading in their field, Eun Sun Kim and Elim Chan.

On Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise this week there’s also a very determined film actress, Moira Shearer, who beat her own path to movie stardom and then married the boss but proved her worth by continuing to star in major pictures long after he died.

All these are available by clicking the links beneath the pictures.

Norma Shearer – Marie Antoinette 1928

Click here to rent for $3.99.

She was a Canadian-American movie star who married the boss and, famously, turned down the role of Scarlett O’Hara. Norma Shearer was a Hollywood star who played spunky, sexually liberated women.

Among her roles were adaptations of Noël Coward, Eugene O'Neill, and William Shakespeare, and she was nominated six times for Academy Awards, winning one for The Divorcee (1930).

Critic Mick LaSalle called her a feminist pioneer, or "the exemplar of sophisticated modern womanhood and ... the first American film actress to make it chic and acceptable to be single and not a virgin on screen".

She wasn’t promising material for a movie star, being by her own estimation, "a dumpy figure, with shoulders too broad, legs too sturdy, hands too blunt", and she was acutely aware of her small eyes that appeared crossed due to a cast in her left eye. By her own admission, she was "ferociously ambitious" even when she was young.

She found out that Universal Pictures was looking for eight pretty girls to use as extras. Norma was the 8th one chosen. She learned that there were exercises she could do to improve the problem with her eye and she practiced religiously. She picked up some modeling work, which proved successful. About her modeling career, she said later: "I could smile at a cake of laundry soap as if it were dinner at the Ritz. I posed with a strand of imitation pearls. I posed in dust-cap and house dress with a mop, for dental paste, and for a soft drink, holding my mouth in a whistling pose until it all but froze that way."

That led to her big break. Producer Irving Thalberg had moved to Louis B. Mayer Pictures and sent a telegram to Shearer's agent, inviting her to come to the studio. After three years of hardship, she was finally offered a contract. It called for $250 a week for six months, with options for renewal and a test for a leading role in a major film called The Wanters.

Meeting Thalberg for the first time she was "impressed by his air of dispassionate strength, his calm self-possession and the almost black, impenetrable eyes set in a pale olive face". He was less impressed with her and insisted on a second screen test. That got her cast in a major picture with an important director for the first time.

But it didn’t go well. The director didn’t like her and wanted her replaced. She knew this was her last chance and the next scene she played was emotional, "I took that scene lock, stock, and barrel, fur, fins and feathers", she remembered, earning her the respect of her director and her studio. As a reward, Thalberg cast her in six films in eight months.

​She became one of the studio’s biggest stars, occasionally complaining to Thalberg that she wanted to be promoted on a par with Greta Garbo. And then, one night, she accompanied him to a premiere and they fell in love. Thalberg's appeal was not primarily sexual. What attracted Shearer was his commanding presence and steely grace, the impression he gave that wherever he sat was always the head of the table. In spite of his youth – he was only 26 – Thalberg became a father figure to the 23-year-old actress.

They were married in September 1927 in the Hollywood wedding of the year, Shearer having converted to Judaism.
Norma continued to be a great success even after the introduction of sound, graduating to difficult roles such as The Divorcee, for which she won an Oscar.

Shearer's marriage to Thalberg gave her a degree of power in Hollywood that was resented by rivals such as Joan Crawford, who complained that Shearer would always be offered the best roles and best conditions: "How can I compete with Norma when she's sleeping with the boss?”

But she was a hard worker and won respect from her costars and directors. George Cukor, who directed Shearer in Romeo and Juliet said of her, “The greatest joy of working with Miss Shearer comes from her complete lack of vanity. Far from bridling at minor criticisms as many actresses do, she will criticize herself with a penetrating, almost unfeminine, impersonal judgment. When she sees the unedited versions of the previous days footage ["rushes"] she seems to cease to be an actress and to look at her own work on the screen with the shrewd and critical mind of a producer.”

Irving Thalberg died unexpectedly just 9 years after their marriage. After his death, Norma’s contract was renewed for six films at $150,000 each. She leaves a considerable body of work.

I’ve chosen Marie Antoinette, largely because my father in law, Robert Morley, got his only Oscar nomination for his role in this picture. Many of Norma Shearer’s other films are still available on various movie websites.

The Quest for Artemisia Gentileschi

Click here to watch

Artemisia Gentileschi, who died 373 years ago today, June 14, 1654, was the first woman to earn her living as an artist but her life and troubled past were as absorbing as her work.

In this BBC documentary, that intrepid traveller, Michael Palin, curious about a powerful but violent painting that caught his eye, sets off on a quest to discover the astonishing story of the almost forgotten female artist who painted it over 400 years ago.

Travelling to Italy in search of Artemisia Gentileschi's tale, Michael encounters her work in Florence, Rome and Naples, not only her paintings but a complex life which included her rape as a teenager and the ensuing indignity of a full trial, her life as a working mother and her ultimate success against all odds as one of the greatest painters of the Baroque age who transformed the way women were depicted in art and who was sought after in many courts across 17th-century Europe.

Since this programme was screened, and partly because of it, Artemisia has been rediscovered and important exhibitions of her work have been mounted in museums throughout the world including London, Paris and Washington DC.

The Radical Art of Mary Cassatt

Click here to watch

The list of female artists who have been recognised as masters in their art is woefully short. One, maybe the first one, is Artemisia Gentileschi. Another who stands out is the American, Mary Cassatt, who died 100 years ago today.

This film, The Radical Art of Mary Cassatt, explores her life and work, from her contributions to the French Impressionist movement to her bold experimentation in painting, pastels, and printmaking. Through interviews with experts, archival footage and photography, and unpublished letters from the artist, we can step into the revolutionary world of Cassatt.

Eun Sun Kim - San Francisco Opera

I heard two wonderful conductors this week, both of them unfamiliar to me. And, not incidentally, both of them women.

At the San Francisco Opera, Eun Sun Kim, a diminutive woman from South Korea, controlled the resources of a Richard Strauss orchestra, with nearly 100 musicians in the pit, and dozens of singers on stage, in a massive production of Strauss’ Electra. It was quite a feat. More than that, it was a beautiful experience forall of them and for the audience.

She has been the Music Director of San Francisco Opera since 2021 and it’s easy to see why. In addition to SFO, Kim appears regularly at many of the world’s leading opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna State Opera, the Berlin State Opera, the Opéra national de Paris, and Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Making her Met debut, the New York Times noted her “assured technical command, subtlety and imagination”.

Here is a little interview with her, where her warmth and infectioius sense of humour are evident.

Elim Chan conducts Tchaikovsky

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The other is Elim Chan, the newly appointed Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. Born in Hong Kong, she was the first female winner of the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition and went on to spend her 2015–16 season as Assistant Conductor at the London Symphony Orchestra. Since then she’s been chewing up international orchestras to tremendous success and she makes her Berlin debut this year.

I was lucky enough to attend this week’s concert but I can’t share it with you because it’s not yet available online. I’d love you to see not only her musicianship and command of the music and the musicians, but also the warmth of her greeting from the discriminating San Francisco audience. She was welcomed with a long standing ovation and I could see smiles on every face. She spoke to the audience both at the start of the concert and during the interval with naturalness and charm. I was very taken with her.

This orchestra belonged to the late Michael Tilson Thomas for many years and, not to be too precious about it, his spirit was definitely present in the Davies Symphony Hall this week. This concert featured Debussy’s  La Mer and Berlioz’s  Les Nuits d’été with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke who followed up with an encore of a Michael Tilson Thomas song "Ich lebe mein Leben" from his Meditations on Rilke series.

I’ll bring that concert to you when it’s released online but, in the meantime, to give you a taste of her energy and talent, here she is, conducting the Suite from Tchaikowsky’s Swan Lake with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Dancing in the Dark - Fred and Cyd

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Following last week’s Backgrounder about Fred Astaire (if you want to see it you’ll have to sign up to join the Backgrounders gang) lots of you have chimed in with your favourite Astaire clip, complaining that I left it out. I couldn’t include them all but here is another great favourite – Fred with Cyd Charisse “Dancing in the Dark” in The Bandwagon.

This may be the most romantic of them all. Thanks to all of you who recommended this one.

Looking forward to next month’s Backgrounder, I was planning to write about David Hockney but, as he has just died and everyone better qualified than I am is writing about him, I’m saving him for a future month when I’ve absorbed what they have written.

So, dear Paid Subscribers, tell me who you would like for the July Backgrounder. Fast, please.

By next Monday I’ll be back in London and will perhaps be able to reconsider all I’ve seen and heard in the wonderful couple of months I’ve spent over here in the US. So please come back for more arts online. Love, Ruth

GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO RUTH LEON’S THEATREWISE

I’ve had a wonderful week in San Francisco staying with friends who are as musically promiscuous as I am. The Barber of Seville, in a splendid production by Emilio Sagi was my first triumph. Well, not my triumph but assuredly one for the San Francisco Opera. Then I was blessed by being able to witness the first concert of the San Francisco Symphopny conducted by their new Music Director, Elim Chan. There was no doubt that the spirit of Michael Tilson Thomas, the late Music Director of the SFO, was hovering over her debut. She’s new to me but I’m now going to make a point of hearing her conduct wherever and whenever I can because she’s a marvel. My fellow audience members welcomed her with an endless (and for once richly deserved) standing ovation and she endeared herself to them with warmth and character and a delightful sense of humour.

I also saw the exhibition of Monet and Venice at the De Young Museum. It’s a jewel of an exhibition, small enough to be able to wallow in every painting, big enough to be able to see the roots of Monet’s Water Lilies in the watery reaches of his Venetian scenes.

Just before I leave I’m planning to see Richard Strauss’ Elektra and another SFO concert. By next week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise I’ll be among the cactuses in Ojai, California, a very different climate, musically and weatherwise, from San Francisco. So, before I get there, here’s what’s on this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise.

It’s the 85th birthday of one of the greatest living pianists, the legendary Martha Argerich. I’ve included two beautiful concerts of hers, one filmed in 1977, the other in 2022. They’re both marvelous. Enjoy one or both as many times as you like.

Always, the Love Story of Irving Berlin is just what it says on the tin. It’s an extended livestream of two of the best New York cabaret performers, KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler singing and playing the love story of Berlin and his wife, Ellen Mackey. This will be performed live in New York at the end of this week with access available for three full days following the live performance.

A different kind of songwriting is showcased in Let It Be Your Will, a celebration of the music, life and legacy of the late Leonard Cohen which includes performances and reflections from many current musical stars.

There’s also a tour of the new exhibition at the Met Museum, called Costume Art, pairing clothes with artworks to explore the inherent relationships between garments and objects from the Met’s collections.

All these are available by clicking the links beneath the pictures.

Martha Argerich at 85

Click here to watch Tchaikovsky No.1
Click here to watch Prokoviev No. 3

Today, we celebrate the 85th birthday of the phenomenal pianist Martha Argerich.

Since her beginnings as a child prodigy and her win at the 1965 Chopin Competition, her sparkling, decades-long career has solidified her reputation as one of the greatest pianists of the century.

She is still performing at the highest level. As proof, here is a choice of Argerich playing the Tchaik­ovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in 1977 and her 2025 performance of Prokofiev’s Concerto No.3 with the Vienna Philharmonic. Why not watch both?

Costume Art - Met Exhibition Tour

Click here to watch

Join Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, on a tour of “Costume Art,” The Costume Institute’s spring 2026 exhibition.

“Costume Art” explores depictions of the dressed body across The Met’s vast collection, pairing garments with artworks to reveal the inherent relationship between clothing and the body.

Focusing primarily on Western art from prehistory to the present, “Costume Art” presents connections between garments from The Costume Institute and objects from the Museum’s other collecting areas. Pairings between fashions and artworks present a spectrum of connections and experiences: from the formal to the conceptual, the aesthetic to the political, the individual to the universal, the illustrative to the symbolic, and the playful to the profound. These pairings are organized into a series of thematic body types that reflect their pervasiveness and endurance through time and cultures.

​“Costume Art” is the inaugural exhibition in the new, nearly 12,000-square-foot galleries adjacent to the Great Hall of the Met Museum. This space will display The Costume Institute’s annual spring show and, at times, shows from the Museum’s other curatorial departments, including those that explore the intersection of fashion and art.

Let It Be Your Will – Leonard Cohen

Click here to watch via Marquee

Leonard Cohen: Let It Be Your Will is a cinematic celebration of Leonard Cohen's music, life, and legacy.

While a star-studded memorial concert at Montreal's Bell Centre sits at the heart of the documentary, the film goes beyond the stage. It seamlessly weaves in archival footage of Cohen alongside reflective interviews with important musicians discussing his profound influence.

Adam Cohen, Leonard's son and longtime collaborator, leads the evening, performing with his father's original band and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

The film features performances and reflections from Elvis Costello, Lana Del Rey, Chris Martin, The Lumineers, Courtney Love, Céline Dion, Bruce Springsteen, k.d. lang, and many more.

Shaped by these voices, this deeply personal, family-led portrait avoids uncritical praise, using Cohen's own dry, self-aware interviews to ground the tribute. As he shrugs and corrects a lyric on screen, the myth softens into a man, leaving the legendary songwriter feeling remarkably present by the final credits.

Always: The Love Story of Irving Berlin

Click here for tickets

One of the happiest experiences of my working life was a show called American Rhapsody: Songs of the Gershwins.

It was a revue starring two of the leading performers in New York’s cabaret world, KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler. Mark and I wrote it, I directed it, they played it brilliantly and it ran off-Broadway for nearly a year. Making that show with them and our very small production team was the most fun I ever had working in the theatre.

Now KT and Mark have a new show - Always: The Love Story of Irving Berlin. I’m not involved in this one, living on another continent, but I wish I could be in New York just to be in the audience at The Laurie Beechman Theatre on June 14th to see and hear the immortal songs of the great Irving Berlin brought to life by these two wonderful performers.

Mark Nadler and KT Sullivan tell, sing and reenact one of the great American love stories -- that of Irving Berlin and his wife, Ellin Mackey, using Berlin's songs to tell the tale.

It turns out that I can be there, and so can you. Well, it’s not quite the same as being in the theatre but it’s the next best thing as they’re livestreaming the show and, best of all of for those of us not in the same timezone, making it available online "On Demand" for 3 days following the performance. The "On Demand" replay will become available approximately 12 hours after the live performance, from June 14-17.

The show features a smorgasbord of Berlin tunes - many well-known, many rarely heard - with a slice of American history thrown in. If you're in New York, go in person but, if not, this is a show worth watching. And happily, online we can all see it too.

Met on Demand 30% off

Click here for Offer

I note that, through June 30 only, the Metropolitan Opera is running a limited-time summer promotion: a one-year unlimited-access subscription to Met Opera on Demand for just $99.99.
​
It’s a good investment for opera-lovers, access to their extensive archive of new Live in HD titles from the 2025–26 season, including La Sonnambula, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, La Bohème, and, even more importantly to me, their entire catalog of more than 950 full-length Met performances.

Several of you have pointed out that I made a mistake in last week’s Theatrewise. Franz Kafka did not take his own life; it was taken from him by starvation caused by his inability to swallow food. He was suffering from laryngial tuberculosis. What a horrible way to die. Apologies for my error.
​Substack is a wonderful platform for my writing but without an editor looking over my shoulder, the only way I can see the error of my ways is when they are pointed out by my readers. I’m sincerely grateful when you do this. Brickbats and compliments are equally welcome.

Please come back next week for more arts online and, if you haven’t already done so, please join the Backgrounders gang in the box below. And, paid subscribers, please come up with some ideas for next month’s Backgrounder. Sorry this is a bit late but my computer is having a bad day.

Have a great week wherever you are. Love, Ruth

Fred Astaire was 34 and at a loose end. Someone suggested he should go to California and take a screen test. The movie executive who evaluated it wrote on his card: “Fred Astaire – “Balding. Can’t sing, can’t act, can dance a little.”

And thus began a 70-year career as a movie star, the most significant dancer in the history of the film industry. When sound came in, Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer (1927) was not nearly as effective in capturing the audience as the human body in motion, the tapping feet and beckoning hands of the dance. Dance provided the perfect synchronization of sight and sound, exhilarating to an audience which had seen only silent movies, and its success was very largely Astaire’s doing.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First came the dancer. Or, more accurately, dancers.

Fred and his sister Adele had been stage stars since they were very young, although the vicissitudes of child stars meant that they had to take a break of several years when Adele grew too tall for them to look good dancing together. Once they got going, however, they had a stream of Broadway and West End stage hits written by the likes of George Gershwin and presented by the top producers.

Frederick Austerlitz was born on May 10, 1899 in Omaha, Nebraska to Fritz and Johanna Austerlitz. Johanna, recognising that Adele, three years older, was a naturally talented dancer and singer, dreamed of escaping Omaha by means of her children’s talents. Brother-and-sister acts were popular in vaudeville and Johanna had a boy and a girl so the reluctant Fred had no choice but to follow Adele to the Chambers Dance Academy in Omaha where he also studied piano, accordion and clarinet.

Fritz and Johanna, now known as Ann, separated when Adele and Fred were eight and five, after a local dance teacher urged them to put the children on the stage in New York.

In November 1905, when Fred was 6, they made their debut in Keyport, New Jersey. The act was called Juvenile Artists Presenting an Electric Musical Toe-Dancing Novelty. Astaire wore a top hat and tails in the first half and a lobster outfit in the second. A local paper wrote, “the Astaires are the greatest child act in vaudeville,” and they were on their way.

For many years thereafter it was understood that Adele was the talented one, Fred just there to support her. Unlike Adele, though, he took it seriously. Dance critic Arlene Croce wrote, “In vaudeville, the grinding schedule of rehearsal and performance made a workaholic of Fred and a slacker of Adele. With her huge natural talent, sparkling presence, and spontaneous wit, she could go on stage with no preparation and improvise, to his intense dismay.”

Fred developed other talents. He was always on the lookout for new music and dance ideas and he took care of the planning, the choreography and the logistics of the shows, always showcasing Adele.

By age 14, he had assumed the musical responsibilities for their act. He first met George Gershwin, aged 16, who was working as a song plugger for Jerome H. Remick’s music publishing company, in 1916 and they became instant friends, George promising to write a musical just for them. This friendship had a profound effect on both careers.

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Good Morning and Welcome to Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” No, we’re not, nor still in my beloved New York City. We’re now in beautiful San Francisco, California, and I’ve just caught my first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. It’s still amazing to me that we can climb into a tincan in London and seemingly five minutes later be at the Golden Gate Bridge.

It’s lovely here. A drive through the city yesterday brought happy reminders of city full of higgledy houses in imaginative colours, climbing up and down gentle and not-so-gentle hills, greenery and parks and wonderful food from every Ethnic direction.

I joined friends in their search for the best fish-and-chips in SF, presumably they wanted me as their English comparison guide to what’s authentic (a word much used here). In a simple outdoor restaurant, where you order and then serve yourself, the results were infinitely better than most English chippies. It was certainly fish, crisply fried and tastier than the flabby whitefish of UK offerings, although the ‘chips’ were definitely not chips – the fat greasy slabs of home. Instead, they were herbed and spiced crispy potato slivers, and irresistible. Delicious, like everything else I’ve eaten in this city where sensible people argue over the minutae of ‘best of’ edibles.

The much-anticipated wedding of my goddaughter was joyous and thrilling. And delicious.And warm and loving. It was wonderful to meet up with old friends, excitedly catching up and falling easily into old conversational patterns which indicate no lack of distance or affection however many years have passed. An epic wedding, not just for the two at the centre of it but also for all of us who got to share it with them.

Scrambling to assemble this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise has been a struggle but I’ve found you some treats.

There’s a delightful full-length production of the musical of The Wind in the Willows starring Rufus Hound as the incorrigible Toad in an adaptation by the Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes.

Dante Alighieri, the poet who was the founder of Italian literature, turns 755 this week and here’s the first documentary I’ve seen in 755 years which makes it easier to understand his master work, The Divine Comedy.

On the anniversary of Franz Kafka’s suicide, here’s a cheerful little film about a little-known part of his working life, his art.

And for those who are still in thrall to the romance of a King willing to abdicate his throne rather than live without the woman he loved, here is a new documentary about ‘David’ and the scandalous Wallis Simpson, King Edward V1 and Mrs Warfield Simpson, subsequently the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It exposes what led up to the Abdication, its implications, and its wider political reverberations in the late 1930s with War beckoning, and beyond.

And for no reason except that he’s wonderful, here’s Louis Armstrong, playing the soul out of “Hello, Dolly”.

All these are available at the touch of a finger on the links beneath the pictures and all but one are free to watch.

The Divine Comedy: How Dante Provided A New World Theory

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755 years ago, on June 1, 1265, the Italian poet, writer and philospher Dante Alighieri was born in Florence. His Divine Comedy, later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. But it’s hard to understand for non-scholars - all those Cantos.

At a time when Latin was still the dominant language for scholarly and literary writing—and when many Italian poets drew inspiration from French or Provençal traditions—Dante broke with both by writing in the vernacular, specifically his native Tuscan dialect.

His use of the Florentine dialect for works such as The New Life (1295) and Divine Comedy helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language. His work set a precedent that important Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would later follow.

Dante claimed that his family descended from the ancient Romans but the earliest relative he could mention by name was his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida degli Elisei, born no earlier than about 1100. Ancient enough, I think.

Dante said he first met Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, when he was nine (she was eight), and he claimed to have fallen in love with her "at first sight", apparently without even talking with her. When he was 12, however, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of Manetto Donati, member of the powerful Donati family. Contracting marriages for children at such an early age was quite common and involved a formal ceremony, including contracts signed before a notary. Dante claimed to have seen Beatrice again frequently after he turned 18, exchanging greetings with her in the streets of Florence, though he never knew her well.

Years after his marriage to Gemma, he claims to have met Beatrice again; he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice but never mentioned Gemma in any of his poems. The exact date of his marriage is not known; the only certain information is that, before 1301, he had fathered three children with Gemma (Pietro, Jacopo and Antonia).

But his love for Beatrice would be his reason for writing poetry and for living. In many of his poems, she is depicted as semi-divine, watching over him constantly and providing spiritual instruction, sometimes harshly. When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante sought refuge in Latin literature. And politics, writing many poetical commentaries and becoming a soldier, an activist, and finally an exile.

To take part in public life, one had to enroll in one of the city's many commercial or artisan guilds, so Dante entered the Physicians' and Apothecaries' Guild. His name is occasionally recorded as speaking or voting in the councils of the republic. Many minutes from such meetings between 1298 and 1300 were lost, so the extent of his participation is uncertain.

Some fifty poetical commentaries by Dante are known (the so-called Rime, rhymes), others being included in the later Vita Nuova and Convivio. Other studies are reported, or deduced from Vita Nuova or the Comedy, regarding painting and music.

This very informative documentary goes a long way to de-mystify Dante’s most famous work.

Edward and Wallis - The Exiled Windsors

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89 years ago this week, on June 3 1936, the Duke of Windsor (who was only the Duke of Windsor because he was no longer the King of England, having abdicated the throne because he was involved with a twice-divorced American, Wallis Warfield Simpson), married the woman he loved, thus making her the Duchess of Windsor.

What happened then was little short of a cataclysm in British society. The faith that had been built up over hundreds of years in the institution of royalty, the belief that the British people clung to that their monarch would always have their best interests at heart, the almost mystical connection between the monarchy and the people they ruled, was shattered overnight.

It had started the previous year when it became clear to the government and to the Prince of Wales’s ‘handlers’ at Buckingham Palace, that he was infatuated with divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson. More than infatuated; obsessed. And this King, unlike his father, was ungovernable.

The King of England, and of Great Britain, had been showering his mistress with extravagant gifts, a warning to the security services of possible blackmail. What to do?

Fears grew, too, of his association with fascist sympathisers, and the possibility the king could attempt to overthrow the government to keep his seat of power on the throne. At the very least, would the affair trigger civil unrest and turmoil in an already unstable country? Behind the doors of 10 Downing street the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had a difficult decision to make.

To spy on the head of state, the monarch, is an extraordinarily controversial and intrusive act, but Baldwin finally gave the order. The British intelligence service began to spy on the King. And so began one of the greatest constitutional crises in centuries.

The American press got wind of the relationship and began to speculate about it but the British press, in the shape of of the two press barons, Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook, were stifled and not a word was published until the final decision was made public.

Here is a fascinating recent documentary about the events leading up to and following the Abdication – Edward and Wallis - The Exiled Windsors.

The Wind in the Willows - National Theatre

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Here is the ebulliant West End musical, The Wind in the Willows from the stage of the London Palladium.

Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame, adapted Kenneth Grahame's Edwardian classic, with music by Olivier Award-winning composers George Stiles and Anthony Drewe.

The story follows Mole, Ratty, and Badger as they try to keep their riverbank life intact while the ungovernable Toad tears through everything in his path.

Green-haired and frenzied, Rufus Hound explodes onto the London Palladium stage as Toad, tearing through Julian Fellowes' adaptation and rewiring Edwardian calm into velocity and misrule.

The first screech of a stolen motorcar gives way to courtroom chaos and a surging steam train chase, as Simon Lipkin's Ratty, Craig Mather's Mole, and Gary Wilmot's ramrod-straight Badger struggle to hold their riverbank life together. Then a final escalation. Toad clears the stage entirely, flying out over the audience on a jetpack.

Captured from above in sightlines no stalls ticket could buy, the Olivier Award-winning team of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe delivers a score that shapes the escapade itself, shifting between choral swell and mischief with precision and wit.

The Secret Art of Franz Kafka

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On June 3, 1924, the writer Franz Kafka took his own life. Before doing so he wrote to his friend, Max Brod instructing him to destroy all existing writings, letters and manuscripts, a instruction that his friend ignored.

While his novels and novellas have joined the canon of European literature and are taught throughout the world, what is less well known is his art. Throughout his life, but particularly when he was a student, Kafka made pictures, sketches and drawings which, while they don’t illustrate his writings, give an often humourous look into Kafka’s unusual mind.
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Here is a short film about them.

Hello Dolly – Louis Armstrong

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Louis Armstrong, in ebullient mood, performs “Hello Dolly” live at BBC Studios in 1968.

Welcome to all the new subscribers. Please come back next week for more arts online. Paid Subscribers, this is the week. Your Backgrounder about Fred Astaire will land in your Inboxes on Wednesday. Any free subscribers who would like to join them, just type your email address into the box below. I’ll welcome you with open arms.

Have a great week. Love, as always, from Ruth

Even the rich have their aggravations, it seems. I’m in the most exclusive tea-shop on Madison Avenue, on Manhattan’s East Side, after having waited on the pavement in a queue for 30 minutes before being seated by a supercilious young man who clearly finds his job far beneath him, at a table so tiny it’s almost a teatray.

The décor is beautiful, tasteful and elegant; the other customers designer-dressed in the latest casual fashion. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon. Teatime. We peruse the menu which is eye-wateringly expensive but what did we expect from a café attached to a Madison Avenue fashion house?

We consider... chocolate cake? Or coconut cake? We agree on one of each. Finally attracting the attention of a server, another young man clearly imagining himself in a different and more exalted job, we order: one iced latte, one drip coffee, two cakes.

“We’re out of cake,” he says, with evident satisfaction. “All that’s left is the almond loaf.” Two of those, then, please. It turns out to be like Starbucks lemon drizzle only without the lemon.

Notwithstanding, my friend and I have a lovely time, having a good laugh at the notice on the table which specifies that customers are expected to give up their table within 45 minutes. The bill, when it comes (very fast) is nearly $40. We have decided that, if this is how the rich live, we’ll leave it to the rich.

Back home, tidying up this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise, I’ve got some interesting anniversaries for you. It’s the hundredth birthday of the great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and I’ve found you a black and white video which shows exactly how special he was.

Talking of special, this week marks the anniversary of one of the biggest arts scandals in history, the premiere of Igor Stravinsky and Vasclav Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, in Paris in 1913. Robert Joffrey was instrumental in resurrecting this famous ballet and here is the full ballet as danced by his company, the Joffrey Ballet, so you can see what the fuss was all about. For those who like their ballet white and floaty and Tchaikowsky-esque, it is still shocking.

As everybody knows, Christopher Marlowe was killed in a pub punch-up in Deptford in 1593 but there was much more to him than an Elizabethan murder mystery, not least that he was both rival and inspiration to Shakespeare and that he wrote the first English tragedy, Tamburlaine the Greate, as well as the Tragical Story of Doctor Faustus.

Here is the 1968 movie of Dr Faustus, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at her most glamorous (even if she doesn’t have much to say). The movie is an inadvertent hoot, Burton taking on the jobs of adaptor, director and star, proving only that he should have stuck to the day job.

And, talking of love stories that went wrong, here is a wonderful discovery, courtesy of Holly Foster Wells, granddaughter of Peggy Lee, of Noel Coward’s Mad About The Boy, recorded in a private session when Peggy had just divorced the boy she was mad about, her husband, and Holly’s grandfather, guitarist Dave Barbour.

All these are free to watch except the Burton/Taylor movie and that can be rented for just $3.99 for 30 days.

Miles Davis at 100

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One hundred years ago today, on May 26, 1926, a very unusual boy was born. He grew up to be among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music.

In a career spanning nearly five decades, Miles Davis was at the forefront of several major stylistic developments in jazz, including bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, third stream, modal jazz, avant-garde jazz, and jazz fusion. His legacy extends into rock, funk, classical, and hip-hop.

Born Miles Dewey Davis 111 into an upper class family in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Davis started on the trumpet in his early teens. He left to study at Juilliard in New York City, before dropping out and making his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker's bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly afterwards, he recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz.

Then he became addicted to heroin and alcohol. He said later, "Sex and drugs took the place music had occupied in my life." But still, at that time, in the early 1950s, sick and hardly performing at all, he recorded some of the earliest hard bop music.
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He made a sensatonal comeback at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955 and recorded the album 'Round About Midnight with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, who became key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s.

Extremely flexible, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, such as the Spanish music–influenced Sketches of Spain (1960), and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959), one of the most popular jazz albums of all time.

He married three times, most notably to the actor Cicely Tyson, and had countless relationships with women, but he was a terrible husband, abusive, violent and often unfaithful.

His health was always precarious, sickle cell anaemia, recurrent pneumonia and diabetes exacerbated by his abuse of drugs and alcohol, so it was almost inevitable that he would die young. It was surprising that he lived as long as he did, until September 28th 1991, at 65.

Rolling Stone magazine described him as "the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century."

Here is just a taste of what Miles Davis could do – the official video of his So What album, a signature performance from him and John Coltrane. Even if you’re not a jazz fan please take the time to listen to this or any one of his albums. My favourite is Kind of Blue, one of the few recordings which I’d take to my desert island.

Christopher Marlowe - Dr Faustus

Click here to rent from Amazon for $3.99

I’ve always thought it’s a pity that the most salient or maybe the only fact every English schoolchild knows about Christopher Marlowe is that he was killed in a tavern brawl in Deptford, of all places.

In fact, Kit Marlowe was a rival and contemporary of Shakespeare, a talented playwright, poet, translater, scholar, a homosexual at a time when discovery was punishable by death, and a spy for Elizabeth 1.

Charming and well-educated, at Cambridge, no less, he spoke several languages including Latin, so he was able to travel freely on missions for England without attracting more than a mild curiousity in the theatre world. He was certainly involved in the vicious war to round up Catholics in this Protestant country and possibly travelled to the College in Rheims where Catholics were trained to return to England to spy for the Pope.

More importantly, to us at least, he was a playwright who wrote what is possibly the first English tragedy, Tamburlaine the Great which made him the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death at the age of 29. There was a lot of interraction between London playwrights at the time and the chances are that Marlowe’s work, particularly The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, influenced Shakespeare, who succeeded him as the preeminent Elizabethan playwright.

Marlowe's literary works have been described as humanistic with realistic emotions, which some scholars find difficult to reconcile with Marlowe's avowed anti-intellectualism and his deliberate catering to the prurient tastes of his Elizabethan audiences by including in his plays a considerable amount of extreme physical violence, cruelty, and bloodshed.

Events in Marlowe's life were sometimes as extreme as those found in his plays. After he died in 1593 everyone in London speculated on the nature and reason for his death. That he was murdered and by whom is not in dispute but the motive is still murky. Conjectures include a vicious bar-room fight, blasphemous libel against the church, homosexual intrigue, betrayal by another playwright, and espionage from the highest level: the Privy Council of Elizabeth I. Marlowe had just become too dangerous, perhaps too politically knowledgable, to be allowed to live.

The first recorded stage performance of Doctor Faustus took place at the Rose Theater on September 30, 1594, by the Admiral's Men.

Here is one of the many versions of Doctor Faustus, this one starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Of the many films they made together, nowhere is their seductive power better showcased than in this adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's classic play.

The legend of Dr Faustus is the tale of a German conjurer who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a life of adventure and excitement. It has proved to be one of the richest legends of our time, inspiring countless plays and motion pictures.

In this (unintentionally hilarious) version, Burton stars as the aging scholar who makes a deal with the devil for youth, knowledge and a dazzling mistress. But when Faustus begins to regret his decision, the devil's assistant, Mephistopheles, sends in Taylor as the seductress, Helen of Troy, who seals Faustus' fate.

The Rite of Spring – Joffrey Ballet

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113 years ago this week, on May 29,1913, one of the biggest musical scandals exploded on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, during the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps. The performance famously degenerated into an uproar, with angry audience members hissing, shouting, and throwing objects at the stage.

The dancers on the stage were unable to hear the music for the noise of the riot and the choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky, jumped on a chair in the wings where they could see him, and clapped the complicated rhythms of the dance for them.

Stravinsky’s score was radically unconventional for the time. It featured jarring, polytonal harmonies, unpredictable and violent shifting rhythms, and heavy brass meant to evoke primitive, pagan Russia.

Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography was equally shocking. Instead of graceful balletic movements, the dancers performed with turned-in toes, knock-knees, and stiff, convulsing, or stomping movements.

The audience was largely split between traditionalists—who were deeply offended by the assault on classical ballet conventions—and younger, progressive artists who were eager to embrace the avant-garde. Factions quickly formed, arguing loudly, which eventually resulted in fistfights in the aisles.

The original Ballet was performed only 9 times in 1913 and then disappeared until, in the 1980s, Robert Joffrey, the dancer and impresario, painstakingly resurrected it as closely as possible to Nijinsky’s original.

Now, 113 years after its first performance, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) is recognised as one of the great works of the musical canon both as an orchestral work and as a ballet. There have been many interpretations of the ballet, including one by Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava.

Here is the Joffrey Ballet's full-length version of Nijinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, filmed in 1987.

Peggy Lee - Mad About The Boy

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My friend Holly Foster Wells, granddaughter of the great Peggy Lee and keeper of her flame, has sent me this remarkably intimate video of her grandmother with the love of her life, guitarist Steve Barbour.

This series of visuals demonstrates, if demonstration was required, the depth of her passion for her then husband, set to her performance of Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” recorded in a single take during an intimate living room jam session in 1952.

Holly writes, “My grandmother often said that when she sang a song, she would envision a little play unfolding in her mind. As I listened to this performance, I had a pretty good idea who the star of that play was: my grandfather, Dave Barbour, who was the boy she was truly mad about."
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"This song was recorded less than a year after their divorce, at a time when my grandmother's heart was still reeling from the painful end of their marriage. She never stopped loving him or hoping they might one day find their way back to each other. In this little film, they do. The cover image is a frame from their 1943 wedding film, captured just after their first kiss as husband and wife - one of the happiest days of her life.”

Thanks for being a free subscriber to Theatrewise. I’m hard at work on the June Backgrounder about Fred Astaire, so if you haven’t already signed up for Backgrounders, please do so now.

And please come back to Theatrewise next week, when I’ll have more arts online for you. Love, Ruth

Good Morning and Welcome to Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise.

I’m still in New York. The temperature is climbing to 90F (32C) today but it’s going to rain tomorrow which will cool things down a bit. I’ve got less than a fortnight before I leave for California. As always, I love where I am and don’t want to leave but I’m excited about the coming San Francisco trip. I’m hoping to see family I hardly know and get to know them better. I’m staying with music-loving friends and we’ve already got tickets for concerts and the opera. The anchor purpose of the trip is the wedding of my goddaughter which will be spectacular but other events are planned too including a run-out to the Ojai Music Festival. More on all this when it happens.

In the meantime, New York is radiant in the Springtime. In an effort to ignore the politics emanating from Washington DC in which the administration is systematically destroying everything that makes the United States admirable, everyone in my bit of New York is out enjoying the sunshine. Today there’s a block party where we’re all going out to plant flowers and shrubs in the tiny spaces between the paving stones. It’s an excuse to meet the neighbours while beautifying an already beautiful block.

I plan to join in later but, in the meantime, I’m here screening away on your behalf, finding good stuff to share. For example, there’s this year’s Miscast, one of my favourite annual events when big Broadway stars get the chance to don a role for which they’d never be cast and sing a song from that show. Every performer is currently starring in a Broadway musical.

Also on this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise is a ballet by the late choreographer, Maurice Bejart, honouring the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima with a score by Mishima’s great friend, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Here’s an interesting look behind the scenes in the conservation studios of the National Gallery before the opening of the current Zurbarán exhibition. I was unfamiliar with the paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán before this but now I’m planning an urgent visit to see them in person as soon as I get back to London.

If you’re a subscriber to Met Opera on Demand (and you should be because I’ve touted it often enough) don’t miss The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, an opera adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize – winning novel. It has a young cast and some knock-out projections that move composer Mason Bates’s eclectic score among the three worlds of Gene Scheer’s libretto: Nazi-occupied Prague, the bustling streets of New York City, and the technicolor realm of comic-book fantasy.

And for a few minutes of sheer delight, the late Tony Bennett teams up with the late Aretha Franklin to sing just one great song. This is how we keep the greats with us even after they’re gone.

All these are available by clicking on the link beneath the pictures.

Miscast 2026 - MCC

Click here to watch

I love this show and recommend it every year. Miscast is a one-night-only musical spectacular featuring Broadway’s hottest stars performing songs from roles in which they would not traditionally be cast—and the results are often thrilling, sometimes hilarious, always worth watching.

This year's version starts wth the entire cast of my current favourite Broadway musical import – Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) - Sam Tutty and Christiani Pitts singing a song from Waitress. If you’re not familiar with Waitress, he’s taking the female role and she the male.

There follows a dizzying stream of songs from great Broadway musicals sung by great Broadway stars, all performing songs they’d never get to sing. Maybe they're the wrong gender, the wrong age, too tall, too short, or just wrong for the part. Here, these supremely talented performers just have fun with songs they love without thinking about whether they'd be suitable for the role.

For instance, Broadway’s current leading lady, Lea Michele, currently starring in Chess, chose to sing the title song from Man of La Mancha. It's fun to see Brian Stokes Mitchell, who was Broadway's Don Quixote in that show, enjoying her performance from just behind her shoulder. He chose to sing Mother's great solo song from Ragtime while Caissie Levy, currently playing Mother on Broadway, watches with a big smile followed by a well-deserved standing ovation.

Here, they’re not auditioning, they’re just showing what they can do and having a good time with an audience largely made up of other Broadways stars who have come along to support them. Every one of these artists is currently the star of a Broadway musical, just not the one they’re singing in this show. This is their idea of fun. Mine, too.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Met Opera on Demand

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This exhilarating new adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is now available to stream from the Metropolitan Opera.

Two Jewish cousins invent an anti-fascist superhero and launch their own comic-book series, hoping to recruit America into the fight against Nazism. Incorporating scintillating electronic elements and a variety of musical styles, composer Mason Bates’s eclectic score moves seamlessly among the three worlds of Gene Scheer’s libretto: Nazi-occupied Prague, the bustling streets of New York City, and the technicolor realm of comic-book fantasy.

Bartlett Sher’s production provides spectacular visuals to match, with towering sets and proscenium-filling projections designed by 59 Studio.

Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts a dynamic multimedia production by director Bartlett Sher, taking the podium to lead a cast headlined by baritone Andrzej Filończyk as the artist Joe Kavalier, who flees Czechoslovakia and arrives at the Brooklyn doorstep of writer Sam Clay, sung by tenor Miles Mykkanen as Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay.

The ensemble also features mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce as Rosa Saks, who raises funds to help Jewish children escape the horrors of the Holocaust, and baritone Edward Nelson as Tracy Bacon, the dashing radio actor who becomes Sam’s unexpected lover.

Zurbarán Portraits – National Gallery

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How were Zurbarán’s life-size portraits used as political statements?
The life-size portraits ‘Asher’ and ‘Joseph’ are among the first works by Francisco de Zurbarán to arrive in Britain. Here is a look behind the scenes in the conservation studios of the National Gallery before the opening of the current Zurbaran exhibition. National Gallery curators Francesca Whitlum-Cooper and Daniel Sobrino Ralston follow the story of the two paintings, from the Spanish painter’s series ‘Jacob and his Twelve Sons’.

When the Bishop of Durham bought 12 paintings by Francisco de Zurbarán in 1756, he did so with a purpose. With the help of Morlin Ellis and Clare Baron from the Spanish Gallery at Auckland Palace in County Durham, they discuss the historical significance behind these works.

Dive even deeper behind the scenes in the Gallery’s Conservation studio, where the paintings have undergone a recent treatment by Conservation Fellows Valeriia Kravchenko and Jack Chauncy. They carefully restored the paintings’ balance of light and dark, ahead of their display in the Gallery’s current Zurbarán exhibition.

Maurice Béjart's "M" - Tokyo Ballet

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Beauty, eroticism, and death become indistinguishable as choreographer Maurice Béjart reaches deep into the mind of Japan's most contested writer.

A contemporary ballet created for The Tokyo Ballet, M is based on the life, work, and death of Japan's most controversial novelist. Yukio Mishima died by ritual suicide at 45 after a failed attempt to incite a military coup, a final act that mirrored the violent beauty he often explored in his prose.

The ballet opens with the sea, a symbol Mishima returned to throughout his writing, and follows him alongside four other selves, each drawn from his novels. In Japanese, ‘four’ and ‘death’ share the same sound (‘shi’), a grim linguistic omen that haunts the choreography.

Scenes from "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," "Confessions of a Mask," and "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" unfold as kimonos give way to military uniforms, then leotards. A long scarlet ribbon is drawn from young Mishima’s body as figures reach for its length.

The movement is at times driven by mechanical sound rather than melody, drawing on gestures rooted in Noh and Kabuki. Created for this company in 1993 and later performed at the Palais Garnier, Béjart resolves the work in a sakura fubuki: a cherry blossom blizzard through which death lifts into light.

Choreographer Maurice Béjart blends classical ballet with noh and kabuki gestures, to a score by Mishima's close friend Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Tony Bennett and Aretha Franklin - Duet

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Tony Bennett and Aretha Franklin recorded the classic song How Do You Keep the Music Playing? in late July 2011. It was composed by Michel LeGrand with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman for the 1982 film Best Friends.

The track was featured on Bennett's album Duets II, which was released on September 20, 2011, to coincide with his 85th birthday. He died in July 2023 at the age of 96. She died in August 2018 at the age of 76.

This performance gives me chills. I think it will do the same for you.

Thank you for your very kind comments on May’s Backgrounder about Diana Vreelander. The Backgrounder for June will be Fred Astaire. If you’re not yet part of the Backgrounder gang you can easily join just by typing your email into the box below.

And do come back next week for more arts online from Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise.

When I first lived in the United States my home was in Washington D.C., one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I’ve spent the past weekend there, enjoying the spring flowers, the sunshine, and the company of my friends. Most of them are current and former newspeople, the kind who are addicted to ‘getting it right’, to finding the story and telling it with conviction and integrity, and who are sometimes bewildered by the determination of so many of their compatriots to get their news from suspect websites, right-wing ‘influencers’ and flat-out liars. Told that TicToc is owned by the Chinese and that he is therefore getting his news about his own country from China, one man, apparently oblivious to the dangers, said, “That way I’m sure I’m getting the truth.”

That’s scary, as much that is happening currently in the beautiful city of Washington D.C. is scary. Familiar places are starting to look different. There are huge banners with President Trump’s face glaring down from public buildings, the Reflecting Pool, a historic landmark which shows both the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument, is being painted bright blue, like a swimming pool, and the proud golden pillars of the Kennedy Center have been painted white, which is odd when almost everything else is being painted gold. My beloved Washington D.C. is currently a sad city and an angry one.

Enough of all that. Back in New York, I’ve been delving into the history of the Oscars or, more properly, the Academy Awards, because this week marks the anniversary of the very first ceremony. The big winner that year, 1927, was Wings, starring Clara Bow and it’s a joyful reminder of the vibrancy of the silent film era.

Another woman starring on this week’s Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise is the 5-time Tony Award-winner, Audra Macdonald. Here is her lovely concert of musical theatre gems from the London Palladium filmed just before she returned to New York to star in Gypsy on Broadway.

On the classical side, conductor Mirga Gražinytė‑Tyla takes us to Amsterdam for a thrilling concert with the Royal Concertgebouw and piano virtuoso Gabriela Montero, performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

The third brilliant woman starring on Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise this week, or fourth if you count Clara Bow, is actor Rosamund Pike whose legal drama Inter Alia has finally been released for online viewing even while she’s still performing it live on stage in New York.

All these can be accessed by clicking on the links beneath the pictures.

Wings – 1927

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97 years ago this week on May 16, 1929, the first Academy Awards ceremony took place in what was not yet called Hollywood, to honour the best pictures of 1927/8.. Tickets for the event cost $5 and the ceremony lasted 15 minutes. The host was Douglas Fairbanks, the president of the nascent Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Here’s the back story of how it came to be. Louis B. Mayer established the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927 purportedly to unite the five branches of the film industry: actors, directors, producers, technicians, and writers.

Asked for the real reason he founded the Awards, Mayer said, "I found that the best way to handle them was to hang medals all over them ... If I got them cups and awards, they'd kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That's why the Academy Award was created."

Major winners at that first ceremony included 7th Heaven and Sunrise, with three awards apiece (the latter winning for ‘Unique and Artistic Picture’), and Wings with two.

The winners had been announced three months ahead of the ceremony. Some nominations did not reference a specific film, so an actor could be awarded for multiple performances: Emil Jannings won Best Actor for his work in both The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command, while Best Actress winner Janet Gaynor was honored for three films.

Charlie Chaplin and Warner Brothers each received an honorary award. Jannings, a Swiss-born performer who gained fame in Berlin, had been notified in advance of his victory; he subsequently posed for pictures with his statuette before leaving for Germany.

Here is Wings, Clara Bow starring with Charles Rogers and Richard Arlen, with Gary Cooper in a tiny role. Two young men, one rich, one middle class, who are in love with the same woman, become fighter pilots in World War I.

Wings, directed by William Wellman, had groundbreaking aerial combat cinematography with real planes and set the standard for future war epics. It was the most technically ambitious film of the silent era and helped shape Hollywood’s big-budget spectacle style.

Audra McDonald: I Am What I Am (Director's Cut)

Audra McDonald: I Am What I Am (Director's Cut)

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With a record-breaking six Tony Awards, alongside two Grammy Awards and an Emmy, Audra McDonald is a powerhouse of musical theatre.

Before she opened in Gypsy on Broadway, she came to London for a sold-out concert at the London Palladium. She fulfilled all the expectations of those of us who believe that she is the natural heir to Ethel Merman in the musical theatre, only better.

Her voice, which can soar into soprano heights and swoop to a raucaus belt, allows her to perform any song that takes her fancy. In this concert she shows her musical muscle, performing a diverse array of showstoppers, including theatre classics, such as “I Am What I Am”, “Summertime” and “Rose’s Turn”, Mama Rose’s mad scene from Gypsy.

This is the directors’ cut of this wonderful Audra McDonald concert, recorded live onstage at the London Palladium.

Inter Alia – Rosamund Pike

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Jessica Parks is a judge, a mother, a wife, a friend. Her career exists inter alia (among other things). How will one unthinkable event pull into question all aspects of her life?

Following their global phenomenon Prima Facie, the ‘dream creative collaboration’ of Suzie Miller and Justin Martin reunite with this searing examination of modern motherhood and masculinity.

Inter Alia features a ‘gale force performance’ from Rosamund Pike and music from Erin Le Count and Jakwob.

Here, at last online, even while Pike is performing the show live on stage in New York, is the sold-out, critically acclaimed show ‘that we should all be talking about’, on National Theatre at Home.

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts Tchaikovsky and Weinberg — With Gabriela Montero

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Conductor Mirga Gražinytė‑Tyla takes the podium at Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw for a thrilling concert with piano virtuoso Gabriela Montero, who performs Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a perennial favourite, lending her artistic sensitivity and astonishing skill to some of the most memorable melodies in classical music.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra bookends the piano treasure with Raminta Šerkšnytė’s De Profundis and Mieczysław Weinberg’s Symphony No. 3.

The result is a rich program that perfectly blends Šerkšnytė’s dramatic dissonances and Weinberg’s stormy tension with Tchaikovsky’s sweeping Romantic lyricism.

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Love, Ruth