Coffee-Table Notes

It was a photograph that became the inspiration for Miss Saigon, the Vietnam War set musical that ran for a decade on the West End after its original production opened in 1989. At the time, French composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and lyricist Alan Boublil were in the full throes of their success with Les Miserables, their musical version of Victor Hugo's epic nineteenth century novel, which had already been running on the West End for four years. That show would go on to be seen throughout the world, while in 2015 its London production celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. With such a huge hit already on his and Boublil's hands, Schonberg was wanting to do some kind of adaptation of Madame Butterfly, Puccini's opera about a US Navy officer's love affair with a Japanese geisha. Exactly how he would do it, however, had yet to be worked out. The fact that Puccini had tried and failed to write an opera based on Les Miserables, but wrote Madame Butterfly instead after deci

When Val McDermid was approached to write a new short story for Edinburgh's Hogmanay by the event's incoming producers, Underbelly, the result looks set to be illuminating on every level. Commissioned by Edinburgh's Hogmanay and Edinburgh International Book Festival, New Year's Resurrection sees McDermid move away from her crime-based novels to bring neglected nineteenth century writer Susan Ferrier back to life. Rather than being confined to the page, New Year's Resurrection will be told by way of Message from the Skies. This literary walking tour and dramatic promenade will the story's twelve chapters revealed across a dozen buildings using projections, music and recorded voices heard by way of an app. Beginning at dusk, Message from the Skies will run every day from New Year's Day to Burns Night on January 25 th , transforming the capital's city centre landscape after dark. The projections will be created by Double Take Projections, the Edinburgh

Dan Jones reckons his heart will be pounding at one minute to midnight on Hogmanay. This probably won't be an unusual experience for the several hundred thousand revellers who are likely to be on Princes Street in Edinburgh as they await the midnight fireworks at the climax of this year's Edinburgh's Hogmanay street party. For Bristol-based composer and sound designer Jones, however, the stress may be heightened. This is likely to be the case for both Jones and his collaborators who've created the first ever original soundwork to accompany the annual pyrotechnical spectacular will be sixty seconds away from seeing if their vision literally goes off with a bang. This will be the culmination of a project commissioned by incoming Edinburgh's Hogmanay producers Underbelly, in which the turn of the year fireworks display will be choreographed to a single nine-minute sound-scape. Working with Skye-based band, Niteworks, and regular firework display designers, Titanium

For the first time in six years, Karen Fishwick is not in panto. This time last year, the Clarkston raised actress was playing the female title role in the Citizens Theatre's seasonal production of Hansel and Gretel. This year, she's hanging out in Edinburgh, putting her feet up while her fiancée does all the work onstage over at the King's Theatre. For many performers at this time of year trying to fill their Christmas stocking, such enforced leisure time would be a disaster. After her Christmas present came early, however, Fishwick is making the most of her time out while she can. As was announced last week, come the new year, she will begin rehearsals playing another title role as half of an altogether less cheery onstage duo when she takes the lead in the Royal Shakespeare's new production of Romeo and Juliet. The company's latest take on Shakespeare's doomed romance will be directed by Erica Whyman, the RSC's deputy artistic director, who in 2016

It seems fitting that John Durnin's final show as artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre is Singin' in the Rain. It was Durnin, after all, who first introduced the idea of producing what is a now annual large-scale Christmas show in a theatre which previously focused solely on its summer rep season of plays. During his fifteen year tenure in charge of the Perthshire based 'theatre in the hills', Durnin has expanded the season into winter even further, with a new staging of The Monarch of the Glen by Peter Arnott being a runaway success this year. In the summer season of plays itself, Durnin has slowly but surely nudged away perceptions of PFT as an old-school purveyor of conservative commercial staples. On the one hand, he he has introduced a stand of contemporary Scottish work by writers such as Liz Lochhead, David Greig and Stephen Greenhorn into the repertoire in ways that at one time would have been unthinkable. Durnin has also staged revivals of neglec

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars I'm A Believer may be a song made famous by both The Monkees and Robert Wyatt, but Neil Diamond's bubblegum pop classic is spot on for the finale of writer David Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori's rollickingly knowing stage version of Dreamworks' animated classic. Given that the ensemble cast are all dressed up as assorted larger-than-life ogres, princesses and fairytale subversions come to dancing life in a cartoon-coloured world, the image is trippy enough to have stepped out of the Monkees' psychedelic big-screen classic, Head. The reference probably isn't deliberate, but every other one is in a show that celebrates the weird, the outsider and the downright other while lacing the love story between jolly green giant Shrek and the too-good-to-be-true Princess Fiona with fleeting nods to its pop culture peers. Disney, Monty Python and, care of Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori, a welter of musical theatre shows are

Bruce McLean doesn't like the idea of being called a performance artist. Nor has the Glasgow-born sculptor ever been the food critic for the Herald or any other newspaper. Both possibilities, however are mooted in A Lawnmower in the Loft, the hilarious new book published this month by the now seventy-something auteur. A series of auto-biographical anecdotes, the title of each in A Lawnmower in the Loft is arranged in numerical and order. As the reader moves from the opening 3 Bandy Legged Scottish Artists from Fig Street, to the final piece, Yorkie Bar Ad, McLean's adventures in the art world over the last fifty years criss-cross between decades and places. The result is a delicious series of thumb-nail sketches that are barely a page long or less to complete a jigsaw of a very funny but still serious man. Much of the fun comes from the fact that pretty much all the yarns McLean spins on the page as if scripting a series of after-dinner yarns revolve in various ways around fo

Hibs Supporters Club, Edinburgh Three stars The doors stay closed once the audience have found sanctuary from the un-named chaos outside in Village Pub Theatre's imagined response to a world gone mad. In the Hibs Supporters Club function room, a magician plays tricks at a small table while we are split into colour-coded groups. On the dance-floor, on the stage and over by the bar, other bodies are loitering, finding space to breathe as they hide in plain sight. Over the next hour, these five survivors share their stories through a series of bite-size encounters that recall the scenes in disaster movies when everyone's thrown together in crisis and discovers the person beyond the strangers they would otherwise never have met. This is certainly the case for the magician in Les, Sophie Good's one-man opening gambit performed by Crawford Logan. It's true too in The Administrator, in which Tim Barrow's clipboard-wielding middle manageress confesses all. In Ja

Nigel Harman wasn't someone theatre audiences might immediately see as being right to appear in Shrek The Musical, composer Jeanine Tesori and writer David Linday-Abaire's stage version of the 2001 animated feature film, which in its relatively short life has become a modern classic. Here, after all, was an actor who had become a household name from his role as Dennis Rickman in TV soap East Enders a decade before, and whose initial shift into stage musicals saw him take on similarly swaggering roles such as hard-boiled gambler Sky Masterson in a West End production of Guys and Dolls. Harman's turn as Shrek's arch villain, the comically diminutive Lord Farquaad, not only caused the actor appear on his knees throughout the show, but saw him win an Olivier award for Best Supporting Performance in a Musical. Such was Harman's affinity with the show that in 2014 he was invited to direct Shrek's UK tour. This is a role he continues as the latest leg of the tour o

CCA, Glasgow until January 14 th 2018 Four stars The female voice is at the centre of this exhibition by three artists who go beyond words to construct a series of town and country landscapes. These veer between communal chorales, silent environments and public proclamations. T he sounds of Hanna Tuulikki's cloud-cuckoo-island ( 2016) and Away with the Birds (2014) overlap in a way that leaves space enough for both to breathe. F ilmed on Eigg, the former finds Tuulikki tak ing on the mantle of Irish king, 'Mad Sweeney', whose call of the wild communes with a real life cuckoo. Away with the Birds is a group vocal composition heard on headphones that evoke s a poetic impression of flight in formation . Susannah Stark's Agora of Cynics (2017) is a series of Greek style foam columns which house a stage for public discourse. T his comes through Searchlights (2017), a sound-work produced with musician Donald Hayden, which sets B erlin Wall graffiti and words f