Arts BOOK REVIEW: Camp Carnage Every now and again a book drops into my slot with perfect timing and I got this one for Halloween. Local boy Joshua Winning and his co-author Elliot Cross have conspired on this book based in a 1980s American summer camp where gay teens are sent to be straightened out but- as is the gore-norm for s By Eric Page • 3 min read
Arts MUSIC REVIEW: Peter and the Wolf: Chamberhouse Winds Chamberhouse Winds are a fun local group of professional orchestral woodwind players with a nice line in millinery who also know how to engage and hold the attention of young children for an hour or so and provide and entertaining and unusual performance for their parents too. By Eric Page • 2 min read
Arts OPERA REVIEW: La Bohème This is the third outing for Millers La Boheme and it’s developing in to a fine vintage, full of flavour and body. Under revival director Natasha Metherell we experienced one of opera’s greatest love stories, tracing the doomed relationship between the impoverished poet Rodolfo and his seamstress gi By Eric Page • 3 min read
Arts BOOK REVIEW: Out There In the year that Scotland voted to not choose independence from the rest of the UK and kicked off a greater debate about the Union and what it is, and what it means to the rest of us in the UK, Freight Books brings a new and definitive anthology of poetry and prose writing from Scotland’s leading an By Eric Page • 3 min read
Arts BOOK REVIEW: Dear Infidel: Tamim Sadikali Dear Infidel is evocative of the frustrations and challenges faced by British Muslims as the gravity of world politics has a domino effect on their own lives. With the news full of young British men going off to fight in a war and for a reason that many find unfathomable this is a well-timed book on By Eric Page • 3 min read
Arts BOOK REVIEW: The Queen of Clubs: Tobias International This is at heart a book balanced on suspense and if you’ve always wondered quote how much of that makeup, attitude and viciousness is left behind in the dressing rooms of Drag Queens then you will enjoy the rising tensions as these Drag Queens clash and wrestle and worse, and be taken up with the ne By Eric Page • 2 min read
Arts REVIEW: Marriage of Figaro This second outing of Fiona Shaw’s Figaro has mellowed and matured in the few years since the last time it graced the ENO stage. The wit is still there, the endless movement and r revolving stage allowing us insight and side squints into the upstairs/downstairs business of this grand space and the s By Eric Page • 4 min read
Arts REVIEW: Best of the Fest The Best of the Fest night always highlights the best stand up comedians who are appearing in the Brighton Comedy Festival. LAST NIGHT’S SHOW, MC´d by Andrew Maxwell in his very ”Orish” way was full of his usual slightly twisted observations about being an Irish man in England and his merciless dire By Eric Page • 2 min read
Arts REVIEW: Briefs: The Second Coming The acts in this cavalcade of burlesque come fast and furious: one moment a slimmed-down Divine lookalike and a bevy (I think that’s the right collective noun) of muscle boys are fan dancing to INXS, the next Evil Monkey Man in your very lap thrusting his nether regions towards your poor, innocent f By Michael Hootman • 1 min read
Arts REVIEW: Dominicanos by Ernest Montgomery This is an exceptional book, full of 128 pages of full colour photographs of some astonishingly beautiful men in a Caribbean country almost as breathtakingly varied as the men who live there. By Eric Page • 2 min read
Arts REVIEW: The Girl of the Golden West: ENO The ENO’s revival of this unfamiliar Puccini opera has successfully shown us the honest human story in this adolescent melodrama without trashing its very sweet and delicate heart. it can be so easy to mock, so difficult to produce free of irony, but the story is deftly handled here. By Eric Page • 4 min read
Arts REVIEW: Xerxes at ENO This is a great production, full of froth and fizz and presenting a non-stop evening of entertainment, with as many musical highpoint as comedic moments and well worth going along to the ENO to see this gorgeous revival. By Eric Page • 3 min read
