Arts Reviews

Once upon a time two men sat in a New York bar lamenting the state of Broadway. So they decided to play Fantasy Musical. Several beers down they came up with a weird hybrid: a jukebox musical that injected the songs of Blondie into the plot of Desperately Seeking Susan. Somehow this botched centaur stumbled all the way to the West End, where it joined that throng of musicals that should have stayed on the drawing board. Blinded by the Light is a Bollywood-style musical comedy set in the Pakistani community of Luton that takes as its soundtrack the oeuvre of Bruce Springsteen. No drunk blokes in a bar could

Last year I found myself giving a lecture in Helsinki. When I came to the end, I asked the audience if there were any questions. There followed a period of complete silence, after which a man cleared his throat and explained that, being Finnish, it was extremely difficult for them to speak in public; they preferred to come to the podium afterwards, one by one. The Finns are a quiet people, and Helene Schjerfbeck — who has claims to be the greatest Finnish painter — is a quiet artist. But her pictures, which are on show at the Royal Academy, have qualities that mild-mannered and taciturn individuals sometimes possess: seriousness

Bunnies were out. Beatrix Potter had the monopoly on rabbits, kittens, ducks and Mrs Tittlemouses. ‘I knew I had to bring in creatures of some kind,’ wrote Roald Dahl on his first thoughts towards a children’s book. ‘But I didn’t want to use all the old favourites that had been used so often before, like bunnies and squirrels and hedgehogs. I wanted new creatures that no one else had ever used.’ After making a long list of earwigs, pond skaters and Devil’s coach-horse beetles, Dahl cast a centipede, an earthworm, a silkworm, a glow-worm, a spider, a ladybird and an old-green-grasshopper. ‘It was fun,’ the author wrote, ‘to sit down

Every summer for the past six years, Bayreuth has risen to its feet to acclaim an English Brünnhilde. Catherine Foster, from Nottingham, was the heroine of Frank Castorf’s anti-capitalist staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. The director was booed to the rafters, the singer hailed as saviour. Three perfectionist conductors, Kirill Petrenko, Marek Janowski and Christian Thielemann, insisted on her return each year. Across Europe, Foster commands the roles of Elektra, Isolde, Senta (Flying Dutchman) and Turandot. At 44, she is approaching her vocal prime. So it is a bit odd to find that no British company has offered her a leading role, or presently plans to do so. Six