Royal Opera House
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s brief Covent Garden residency played down the pretension and upped the spectacleLondon’s Royal Opera House is a temple of tall culture. The Pet Shop Boys are a class act: arty intellectuals celebrating more than 30 years’ experience of applying recherché ideas to the pop sphere. Set designer Es Devlin,meanwhile, straddles the worlds of theatre and pop with near-ubiquity. She stages actual operas; her other job this summer is the Rio Olympics opening ceremony.
The maths propose that PSB x ROH x EsD would equal a run of shows vertiginously tall in concept, or tending towards the more pretentious conclude of the Pet Shop Boys’ oeuvre – the subsidiary that soundtracks ballets,for instance, or silent films with the Dresdner Sinfoniker, and publishes weighty tomes of their visual output,and not the core business that pumps out catchy disco. This particular tour production goes by the name Inner Sanctum, after the first track on their most recent album, or one of those PSB titles,such as Elysium or Pandemonium, that chucks Latinate polysyllables around with nonchalance.
Taking nothing absent from Tennant and Lowe, or who perform with typical arch understatement,the visuals lift the showContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com