Montano David Kempster Cassio Mark le Brocq Iago Robert Hayward Rogerigo Richard Roberts Otello David Rendall Desdemona Susan Bullock Emilia Rebecca de Pont Davies Messenger Anthony Cunningham Lodovico Mark Beesley Conductor Paul Daniel Director David Freeman Designer/Translator Tom Phillips (Why isn't this Othello? Everything else is in English.) As Nicolas Palmer noted, David Freeman's production of Otello has had a mixed reception, but the musical performance has been generally well received. Tonight I found the music always coherent and engaging, and sometimes exciting. The audience seemed to love it. As Otello, David Rendall sang more convincingly that he acted, though his acting wasn't bad. He probably benefited from not having to pretend to be twenty two years old. Robert Hayward as Iago showed that he has the makings of a Verdian heavy. The two of them made the duet at the end of act 2 painfully intense, like a twisted inversion of the Liberta duet in Don Carlos. Hayward was also a coldly sinister villain. You knew there was going to be trouble when he took his glasses off. Susan Bullock did some beautiful singing, particularly in act 3. And Rebecca de Pont Davies was a real presence in the musically very small role of Emilia. The production added connotations that not everyone might find acceptable, though I didn't feel that it damaged the performance of the music, or the core sense of the work. In "modern" Cyprus, Otello is commander of a military unit policing the green line. The soldiers (fully co-ed) have British-like uniforms with blue berets and the lion of St Mark as their insignia, and there is a full-scale war on. (The references to the Turks make spurious sense here.) Desdemona is an officer's wife, wearing a sequence of Cilla Black outfits and initially nurturing everyone in sight. The problem is the apparent exploitation of stories from recent years of British soldiers in Cyprus, and UN soldiers in Somalia, committing violent crimes while out of their heads with drink and stress. Also stories of adultery and murder in the British army stationed in Germany. This context would have helped Freeman's production of Die Soldaten (where I didn't notice it), but Otello is surely more about ambition and pride than stressed-out machismo. But Otello actually is about stress, in particular the stress between public duty and personal feelings. Freeman's production and Tom Phillips' set hit the spot here. Everything happens in a public area inside a wire fence. There is an observation tower at the back of the set, and guards and soldiers go about their jobs at all times. Otello can see Desdemonoa all the time and become obsessed with her behaviour. They two of them can go aside to talk, but they can't have any real privacy. When he beats her up during the formal ceremony to welcome the Venetian envoy, he has nothing to loose by it (though it is still shocking). His credibility has already been destroyed by the other scenes they have had. In act 4, Desdemona's room is marked off only by a square of light, and the other characters simply run through the walls when Emilia screams. We probably can't buy into the idea of heroism and public service as it was seen in either Shakespeare's or Verdi and Boioto's time. But maybe there's an underlying question which is still worth asking in both works (and in Don Carlos and Boccanegra) about how public figures can reasonably have personal lives (be human) at all. These days everyone lives in glass houses. By coincidence, the theme of the interaction between military and personal affairs is also at the centre of Strike up the band, but in a strictly comical way. The 1927 version by the Gershwins and George S. Kaufman had a semi-staged performance with full orchestra at the Barbican on Friday in the Lost Musicals series. It's heavily operettaish, but still has a fair old satirical bite and a few wonderful Gershwin moments. The plot is worthy of Oliver Stone. The US goes to war with Switzerland over cheese tariffs at the behest of Horace J. Fletcher, of Fletcher's American Cheese, who agrees to finance the war because he thinks he will make a lot of money from it. The president doesn't know about it -- Colonel Holmes, his unofficial ambassador, doesn't want to bother him. Fletcher's daughter Joan is in love with a dairyman turned journalist who is accused of cowardice but wins the war with the assistance of George Spelvin, a mysterious figure closely related to Jimmy Durante or Chico Marx. (Sam Kelly made him resemble Eric Morcombe.) The satire is virulent and very funny. The Very Patriotic Committee ("We have come together completely voluntarily to make sure that everyone thinks like us") put on white pointed hoods before they discuss how to make sure that everyone is very patriotic. And the idea of the military-industrial complex being based on cheese is pretty funny in itself. There's also an incidental scene where Colonel Holmes and Mrs Draper (the Margaret Dumont character) get drunk and list the street names in Washington DC. '"It's a great little alphabet". "Yes, I use it in all my books".' The score is mainly Gilbert-and-Sullivan like, with some nifty character and patter songs. It also includes The man I love, several times, and the title song, which is an infectious march with (in this version) grossly inappropriate words ("We're in a bigger, better war/For your patriotic pastime/We don't know what we're fighting for/But we didn't know the last time!" sc. 1917). And there's Homeward bound, a lovely song for "The soldier" sailing back from Europe after the war, movingly sung by Dominic Natoli. This begins with a Russian-sounding modal melody, and evolves elegantly into a simple major key expressive of contentment as the singer's imagination moves towards his home. The music isn't quite a big deal in Strike up the band -- the book is what makes it worth performing. But the Gershwins, like Irving Berlin, could turn out interesting, expressive and amusing songs without a trace of the mechanical. I found a nice quote from Arnold Schoenberg in today's Guardian: "His [George's] melodies are not products of a combination or of a mechanical union. They are not even welded together, they are cast." There's a funny piece in the same paper about how people kept writing to J. Edgar Hoover to denounce Groucho as a Commie.