AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮✮ The Winter's Tale Christopher Wheeldon The Royal Ballet | London Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale is poised to become one of the year's most celebrated ballets, and rightly so. The production excels on nearly every front, delivering an elegiac, immersive confluence of choreography, scenery and music that isolates the psychological themes of Shakespeare’s text – jealousy, regret, redemption – and expertly wrings them of their humanity. Crafting a full evening-leng

✮✮✮ 1/2 The Bridges of Madison County Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre | NYC music & lyrics Jason Robert Brown book Marsha Norman directed by Bartlett Sher This show's titular covered bridges are the gentlest possible kind of tourist attraction – charming, dour 19th century wooden structures. And this new musical is similarly unassuming in scope, dealing with a small, fleeting, suburban affair based on Robert James Waller’s bestselling 1992 novel of the same name – an intimate, tear

✮✮✮✮ Mike Bartlett's King Charles III Almeida Theatre | London directed by Rupert Goold Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III is a modern day Shakespearian masterpiece. A piece of lèse-majesté which if performed in Shakespeare’s time, would surely have led to imprisonment and execution. Thankfully, this wonderful production at the Almeida should escape calls of treason. The play opens with the funeral of our much loved and popular Queen. Elizabeth II has died after seventy gloriou

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 Simon Stephens' Birdland The Royal Court Theatre | London directed by Carrie Cracknell As though in a scene from an old, old fairytale: a prince whose every demand is anticipated and met demands a perfect peach. Not too green, not too ripe, locally grown. The scene could be a parable for what money can't buy you – and in a more straightforward story it might be. But Simon Stephens' bleakly brilliant new play tells you both what money can buy, and what it can’t, chron

✮✮✮✮ Simon Stone's The Government Inspector inspired by Nikolai Gogol Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Simon Stone First published in 1836, Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector has long been considered a masterpiece in comedy, farce, and political criticism. This co-production by Sydney's Belvoir St Theatre and Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre takes its inspiration from Gogol's work, and while retaining certain thematic and structural features of the original, it stra

✮ Strauss' Arabella Salzburg Easter Festival Florentine Klepper | Christian Thielemann When the Berliner Philharmoniker announced its decision to abandon the Salzburg Easter Festival after more than four decades, the shock-waves could be felt across the Continent. But in a compensating surprise move, executive director Peter Alward wasted no time in netting Christian Thielemann and the Dresdener Staatskapelle to fill the brief. Just two years down the track, the Staatskapell

✮✮✮✮✮ Marius von Mayenburg's Perplex Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Sarah Giles Life is what you make of it – and from Perplex’s point of view it is most certainly a comedy. Marius von Mayenburg's script is a mischievous existentialist meditation on middle class life that uses the stage as a laboratory to examine wide-ranging beliefs about the nature of humanity and our various theological conceptions of what occurs beyond. Mayenburg's writing is also interested

✮✮✮ Chekov's Three Sisters Southwark Playhouse | London directed by Russell Bolan Three Sisters opened at the Southwark Playhouse in a new version by award-winning writer Anya Reiss. Reiss, well known for her work at the Royal Court, her modern adaptations of Spring Awakening and another Chekov with last year's The Seagull, now tackles Three Sisters: a challenge in itself which Reiss takes it on head-first with mixed results. The setting ('near a British Embassy, overseas, no

✮✮✮ LAC (After Swan Lake) Jean-Christophe Maillot Les Ballets de Monte Carlo | London Coliseum It’s impossible to view new productions of Swan Lake in isolation, such is the ballet’s historical prevalence. Jean-Christophe Maillot is the latest in a long line of choreographers to recast the dark tale through a specific lens in an effort to distinguish his version from the many that have come before it, employing a sensual filter that tinges the mood with a discernible layer of