A night at the opera: That Bastard Puccini! (Park Theatre)

Itās hard to imagine that itās only been 130 years since Puccini first premiered La Boheme. Nowadays, itās a revered classic, and guaranteed to be on any opera company's annual programme if it needs to stay afloat. Itās a crowd pleaser with its melodrama of poor, impoverished artists loving, starving and dying in Paris. But Pucciniās La Boheme had a less auspicious beginning, with one of his contemporaries accusing him of stealing his idea and being poorly received on its first outing. And thatās at the heart of That Bastard Puccini! Currently playing at Park Theatre , writer James Inverne uses the friendship and rivalry between the two composers, Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, to weave a comic tale of creative frustration with an awful lot of facts and tidbits about the opera scene at the time. Itās part comedy, part music appreciation. It opens with Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) at home with his wife Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood), cursing about Pucciniās latest work, which is drawn ...