Trusting the Material
10 – 16 January 2026
Saturday 10 January
To London by train
London, Southwark Playhouse Elephant • I’d already seen Ride the Cyclone at Washington’s Arena Stage in 2023, so I gladly took the opportunity to renew the experience at London’s newish Southwark Playhouse Elephant. This peculiar 2009 Canadian musical has been making the rounds, with a notable 2016 Off-Broadway production at the Lucille Lortel. It seems to have gained cult status with Gen Z audiences, presumably because of its humorous but sympathetic depiction of its protagonists, troubled teenagers killed in a freak roller-coaster accident. Given a chance to plead for their return, Carousel-style, they are led to bare their souls under the watchful, judgmental eye of Karnak, a mechanical fortune teller. The piece is tightly written and this London production did it full justice in every department.
London, Bridge Theatre • Jordan Fein’s production of Into the Woods paired a superb visual concept with flawless, faithful sound design, resulting in a fluid and consistently impactful performance of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s masterpiece. The spatial configuration, very different from that used for Guys and Dolls, further demonstrated the theatre’s versatility. The cast was uniformly strong, with standout contributions from Jamie Parker as the Baker and Kate Fleetwood as the Witch. I found a few minor staging choices to be questionable, but such quibbling hardly matters when a piece is treated with this much love and craft.
Sunday 11 January
London, Tate Modern • I realised too late that the Lee Miller exhibition I wanted to visit was at Tate Britain, not Tate Modern. The mistake gave me an opportunity to see a display of works by Giacometti, strikingly scenographed in Tate Modern’s concrete tanks, as well as Theatre Picasso, an exhibition drawn from the Tate’s holdings whose curation raised interesting questions about the artistic persona that Picasso projected — and, more broadly, about what it means for an institution like Tate to hold an artist’s work.
London, Savoy Theatre • The new musical Paddington, by Tom Fletcher and Jessica Swale, is too long, gives too much time in the limelight to secondary characters, and features a decidedly uneven score, with more than a few subpar songs. And yet it is joyous, moving, warm-hearted, visually stunning, and reassuringly familiar: there is never any doubt that this Manichean story is headed for a happy ending. Paddington sounded strikingly like Ben Whishaw, who gave him his voice in the 2014 film. It looks to me as if the Savoy Theatre has got itself a tenant for a few years.
Back to Paris by train
Monday 12 January
Paris • Watched a filmed performance of the 2025 Broadway play Good Night, and Good Luck on Netflix. CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow’s confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s feels eerily current, and the play closes with a chilling montage of recent moments in which the press did — or did not — fulfil its role in the fragile balance of power. The elaborate scenic design was somewhat reminiscent of London’s National Theatre production of Network in 2017. The closing speech, delivered by George Clooney with quiet magnetic authority, draws both on Shakespeare — Murrow famously quoted Julius Caesar — and on The Untouchables: “What are you prepared to do?”
Wednesday 14 January
Paris, Théâtre de l’Athénée • In Georges Lavaudant’s staging of Le Misanthrope, a two-sided abstract set-piece alternated between a shiny exterior and a darker, wings-like, more secluded space. The disciplined delivery of every line and the attention to inflection and meaning put the text firmly front and centre, yielding a pure, almost raw theatrical experience, underpinned by an impeccable cast.
Thursday 15 January
Paris, Philharmonie • Approximately four months after adding Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1 to their repertoire, the Orchestre de Paris, this time under Andrés Orozco-Estrada, opened another concert with Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 5, scored for four brass players only. Gautier Capuçon then offered a moody, introspective reading of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2. The concert, sadly, ended on a false note, with an over-interpreted, over-affected, over-articulated account of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, a score already so rich in effects that it fares much better when left to its own devices. The orchestra seemed to be having the time of their lives.
Friday 16 January
To Amsterdam by plane
Amsterdam, Concertgebouw • The Nederlands Philharmonisch, under Lorenzo Viotti, gave a gripping performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, with soprano Nikola Hillebrand and mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti — not the first instance of siblings sharing a stage. Viotti took risks — and mostly reaped the rewards — by aiming big: big contrasts, big sound, big climaxes. Orchestra and chorus almost never let him down, building to a roof-raising finale that sent shivers down my spine while staying completely focused and in-style.
And so, for now, the lights dim… until the next act.