Birthdays & Families
24 – 30 January 2026
Saturday 24 January
To Manchester by plane
Manchester, Palace Theatre • This fourth UK touring production of the musical The Bodyguard, packed to the rafters, illustrated the longevity of a show which, though moderately well received by the critics when it originally opened in 2012, didn’t make West End history. And yet there have been many national and international productions since, the sure sign that there is a market for such a jukebox musical, where songs feel somewhat shoehorned into the plot with limited attention to context or coherence. The most pleasant part of the experience for me was to resurrect memories of the original production that I thought long forgotten.
Manchester, Royal Exchange Theatre • A production of Singin’ in the Rain in the round, where projections are nearly impossible, doesn’t come without challenges. Raz Shaw’s staging, sadly, didn’t solve the squaring of the circle, making some scenes pretty awkward. Nonetheless, the company exhibited contagious energy, and the four leads’ shoulders proved strong enough to carry the considerable demands of their parts — let alone the inevitable comparison with the mythical film version. The orchestra, though, was the real star of the evening. Under the stewardship of conductor Matthew Malone, they gave a swinging, toe-tapping, high-energy interpretation of Nacio Herb Brown’s enchanting score.
Sunday 25 January
Back to Paris by plane
Paris, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées • A few weeks after celebrating his 90th birthday, Jean-Claude Casadesus led a special concert of the Orchestre Colonne, an ensemble where he had debuted as a timpanist before forging a special relationship as a conductor. The programme — Verdi’s La Forza del destino overture, Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique — was uneven in many respects, but Casadesus’s youthful enthusiasm more than compensated. His grandson Thomas Enhco was the soloist in the Ravel concerto, and a series of surprises rounded off the concert, involving the likes of Gautier Capuçon, Nicolas Dautricourt and Pierre Arditi.
Monday 26 January
Saint-Denis, Théâtre Gérard-Philippe • I jumped at the opportunity to see Schiller’s Mary Stuart in a visually arresting staging by Chloé Dabert — even if it meant sitting for nearly four hours on an uncomfortable bench. The production emphasised the contrast between the cold, calculating Elisabeth and the fiery, impetuous Mary, trapped despite themselves in intractable religious strife. The French text by Sylvain Fort suggested that the intrinsic musicality of the original German dialogue had been rendered in a fluent, ear-pleasing cadence.
Tuesday 27 January
Paris, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées • On his 50th birthday, Renaud Capuçon led the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in a chronologically disjointed programme coupling Beethoven’s so-called Triple Concerto with Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8. I didn’t expect to be quite so blown away by Capuçon’s conducting of the Symphony, a triumph of luxuriant warmth animated by a finely judged sense of forward momentum. The Triple Concerto proved less compelling, even though Capuçon was joined by his brother Gautier at the cello and the marvellous Martha Argerich at the piano. Talk about an abundance of riches!
Wednesday 28 January
Paris, Opéra-Bastille • Continuing its ongoing Ring cycle, conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado and directed by Calixto Bieito, the Opéra de Paris offered a musically satisfying Siegfried that nonetheless suffered from a lack of clarity in its staging concept. I am all for directors asserting the contemporary relevance of grand old operas by imprinting a novel idea upon them, but the overarching vision should come across more clearly than it did here. The orchestra and singers delivered many pleasing episodes, with the Act III confrontation between Derek Welton’s Wotan and Marie-Nicole Lemieux’s Erda standing out as particularly strong and gripping.
Thursday 29 January
Paris, UGC Maillot • Jean-Paul Salomé’s L’Affaire Bojarski (aka The Money Maker, 2025) draws on the real-life story of one of the most successful banknote counterfeiters ever. Jan Bojarski and Detective Mattéi’s cat-and-mouse dynamic carried a distinct Catch Me If You Can flavour, while the painstaking recreation of the money-printing process — alongside the period furniture and clothes — proved oddly captivating.
Friday 30 January
Paris, Théâtre du Châtelet • Philippe Leroux and Raphaèle Fleury’s operatic adaptation of Paul Claudel’s L’Annonce faite à Marie proved to be a challenging experience. Leroux’s music teemed with unorthodox forms and inflections; it felt as though the feelings and tensions onstage were mirrored by a complex, dense aural counterpart. I wish I could have seen the orchestra produce such an extended palette of sounds and I found myself admiring the performers for memorising such intricate patterns involving jumps, glissandi and spectral harmonies.
And so, for now, the lights dim… until the next act.