Welcome to my first Londoness Loves, my pick of the best theatre, art exhibitions, music, and events in London this March 2018. And there’s some London magic for the kids as well. Have a marvellous March! Love Londoness. Top Pick Sondheim on Sondheim I’m toe-tapping down the days to this one: the European premiere of…
Civilisations on BBC2
In 1939, the Director of the National Gallery was tasked with the critical job of moving the museum’s monumental art collection from London to a disused mining cave in Wales. In its cavernous outpost, this priceless stockpile would be safe from the nocturnal bombs raining down on the city during the Blitz. The guardian of…
Review: Jubilee at Lyric Hammersmith
If you lived in Paris during the 1970s, it was easy to bypass the whole punk thing the Brits had going on over here. To we Frenchies, “punkness” seemed a bit of a London cliché, something you saw on a postcard: a menacing miscreant standing next to a red phone box, a face full of…
Review: Satyagraha at the ENO
I would like some of what Philip Glass is on, please. I would like to crawl into his brain for a few hours and see what makes him tick. In the ENO’s production of Satyagraha, the American composer’s operatic masterpiece has been placed in the capable hands of director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch…
My top once in a lifetime experiences
This month’s travel link up is all about those once in a lifetime experiences. My intrepid exploration list includes navigating the underbelly of Paris, watching Pink Floyd in the world’s most beautiful palace, listening to the thunderous roar of waterfalls, having lunch in the Côte d’Azur rain (twice) and treading the boards of La Scala…
Charles I at the Royal Academy
Drum roll please, I am about to tell you about an exhibition worth curtsying for, a show fit for royalty. It has pomp, it has circumstance, and its hero is the bad boy of the British royal family, the king who takes the prize for being the first, and last, to have his head chopped…
Floating Palaces at the V&A
Ocean Liners: Speed and Style at the Victoria and Albert museum is an exhibition with some serious swagger. You might want to dress up for this one, as it’s all about the glitz and the glamour of the golden age of travel, and it might leave you feeling, well, a tad mundane. Ocean Liners is…
Lunch at Harry’s Dolce Vita
Harry’s Bar. Don’t you just love those two words? It instantly brings to my mind the bitter taste of a pomegranate-coloured Negroni, Harry’s style, in Venice. There really is nowhere else in the world where I would rather sip my favourite drink. So, imagine my excitement when I heard Harry’s Dolce Vita, had opened in…
Portrait of an Art Addict
One of my recurring fantasies is the Dinner Party where the living and the dead, my gods and goddesses, come together for dream dinner banter. My table is a large one, admittedly, and it includes Peggy Guggenheim. I’m not even sure I would have liked Peggy, but boy did she live the life. She mixed…
Afternoon Tea with Alan B’Stard (well, sort of)
The Palace of Westminster, or Houses of Parliament as it’s commonly referred to, is one of London’s ultimate tourist hot spots, even if Big Ben is hibernating for the next three years whilst he gets a makeover. When I first arrived in London in the late 1980s, I would count the days until megalomaniac MP…