Warwick Thompson

Hot on the heels of Glyndebourne’s “Giulio Cesare” at the Metropolitan Opera, the U.K. festival opens with another excellent staging.

The satire hits with a surprising slap in Harold Pinter’s “The Hothouse.”

Dramatic irony is a great theatrical tool. Double the irony, and you double the rewards.

Any poker player, gambler, or theater producer will tell you there’s no such thing as a sure bet. It’s just that some bets are surer than others.

Murder among mattresses and meatballs is not quite what Verdi had in mind for “Un Ballo in maschera.”

Joan Collins is 79, and still treading the boards. Placido Domingo is 72, and singing a title role at the Royal Opera. It’s all go for funky septuagenarians in London.

Composer Michel van der Aa has just scooped two awards, together worth $165,000, and is about to premiere a new work in London.

The 18th-century founder of modern capitalism was Adam Smith, not the Marquis de Sade.

When Alice in Wonderland met Peter Pan she was a cantankerous old lady and he a gloomy dipsomaniac.

The musical juggernaut that is “The Book of Mormon” rolls into London squashing everything in its path. It trails awards from New York, is already sold out until June, and is seemingly critic-proof.

At the moment she’s pretending to eat a cooked human heart. A few months ago, she was singing opera en pointe and conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.

Shakespeare gave us a queen driven to murder and madness. Racine gave us a queen whose incestuous longings ended in suicide. Peter Morgan’s Queen Elizabeth II drinks tea.