Allan Radcliffe

Dec 8, 2024 | thetimes.com | Allan Radcliffe

Last festive season Scottish Ballet created something of a talking point with a delightful reimagining of Cinderella in which the lead role was danced by either a man or a woman on different nights. This year, it has fallen back on an old favourite, The Nutcracker, featuring the choreography of Peter Darrell, the founder of the company. First staged in 1973, Darrell’s version is regularly updated.

Dec 5, 2024 | thetimes.com | Allan Radcliffe

The last time Dickens’s perennial favourite appeared at Northern Stage, it was in a flurry of Jazz Age glitz courtesy of Mark Calvert’s 1920s update. Natalie Ibu’s production of A Christmas Carol takes as its basis the reliable adaptation by Karen Louise Hebden, first staged in 2003, though there are plenty of innovative touches amid the stage smoke and quotable dialogue.

Dec 1, 2024 | thetimes.com | Allan Radcliffe

The Lyceum tends to steer clear of pantomime at Christmas, though in recent years the theatre has followed the traditional panto trope of bringing topical and local references to bear on classic stories. David Greig’s An Edinburgh Christmas Carol worked wonders in transposing Dickens’s tale to Victorian Auld Reekie. This new adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure has a similarly Scottish flavour.

Nov 21, 2024 | thetimes.com | Allan Radcliffe

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music is a show usually associated with scale, whether it be the lavish 1965 film adaptation or the 2006 Andrew Lloyd Webber-produced revival that sold out the London Palladium for its entire run. In her final production as artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Elizabeth Newman marshals the story of the novice nun turned nanny Maria Rainer, who brings music, joy and love into the lives of the grieving Von Trapp family, into a more intimate space.

Oct 27, 2024 | thetimes.com | Allan Radcliffe

The spectre of Marlon Brando hangs heavy over any production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The mix of threatening brute strength and magnetic beauty that the actor brought to his role as Stanley Kowalski, both in the 1947 stage production and the 1951 film adaptation, proved so powerful that, for years, it was Brando’s image that graced the cover of published editions of Tennessee Williams’s script.