The 76th HOLLAND FESTIVAL takes place in Amsterdam

1st June – 1st July. The Holland Festival invites everyone to celebrate the arts in June, to reflect on the…

The DELFT FRINGE FESTIVAL 2023 - Now in it's 10th year

31st May – 11th June. For nine days you will experience Delft in a different way. In the first two…

STET presents THE HEAD WRAP DIARIES at Zaal 3 in The Hague

2nd – 4th June. Three fierce, clever and witty female characters explore femininity, beauty, culture, and most importantly; hair in…

NDT presents RAW ARE THE ROOTS on tour

11th May – 6th June. Premieres on 11th May at Amare in The Hague. The full-length programme comprises two world…

OperaZuid presents ORPHÉE AUX ENFERS on tour

19th May – 22nd June. Opera Zuid presents Offenbach’s dazzling comedy Orphée aux Enfers Opera Zuid is touring the country…

The open-air concert venue allowed for streams of golden sunbeams straight onto the Man with the Golden Voice himself as Carrack surely lived up to his name. The set list was made up of flawlessly manoeuvred covers of some of his favourite jazz, soul, gospel and blues songs. Paul Carrack and his band bounced between performing heart-wrenching ballads such as Raining in My Heart and The Living Years, which brought a chill down the audience’s spine, several soul-elevating melodies like Groovin’, as well as a few songs from his prolific personal career.

The Galerie RuimteRemmelink is showing the work of Maurice Braspenning. Entitled Into the Wild the exhibitions consists of paintings, both large and small, of wild animals – monkeys, wolves and some small
paintings, sketches almost, of birds. His monkey painting are bright and bold with lots of ultramarine blue, the hard-edged foliage a bit like Henri Rousseau, the wolves more muted with greys and browns.

BOOM ROASTED, does what the title says, mocking America, the Netherlands and a few other countries along the way too, much to the audience’s delight. In fact, it is mainly the Netherlands that comes in for derision, with numerous mentions of it’s bland food, meanness and lack of tact or emotion. If these comic gambits are a bit long in the tooth, it didn’t matter much to the audience. They lapped it up and were clearly having a raucous, Tuesday night out.

Nederlandse Reisopera, together with Den Kongelige Opera (Copenhagen) and Teatr Wielki (Warsaw), rekindles Beethoven’s most isolated piece and retells the story of Fidelio in a picturesque and sublime modern adaptation. With internationally renowned soprano Kelly God in the role of Leonore and tenor Bryan Register as the wrongly imprisoned husband and politician, Florestan, we are engrossed in their resonating vocals and the dynamics of the entire production.

ARISE 20th May.

Boons creates from a distinctly female angle and last night, the Korzo offered its platform to Arise, a production both unsettling and uplifting. The impact of Boons’ short composition is immediate. For thirty minutes the audience is asked to confront the female condition and its attendant challenges. Boons’ work is brutal in its honesty and unflinching in its determination. At no point is the audience offered an opportunity to look the other way and at no point were we inclined to avert our attention.

A talented cast makes this pacy off-Broadway musical a delight!
Having only had a short London run at the Donmar Warehouse, I was not familiar with this small-scale musical with a big title. The premise is that six wacky, oddball school kids take part in an annual spelling contest and more than that you don’t really need to know.

This relatively small exhibition in the Kunsthal’s top gallery demonstrates the full gamut of Mr Pantone’s talents. There are flat wall paintings, walk through mobile installations and, perhaps most interestingly, a large sculpture that was created virtually by the artist in an empty room wearing virtual reality goggles whilst waving some sort of magic wand around. The image only existed in his goggles and was then transformed by computer into a sculpture using 3D printing. Near the metallic sculpture there is a fascinating video of the artist creating the piece, a piece that is invisible to everyone except himself.

Taking the themes of “conventional/accepted forms of love versus unconventional/unaccepted forms” in Chekhov’s and Walt Whitman’s work, Remers is determined to express that “certain groups of people still face the same challenges and have to ask how far they’re willing to go in staying true to themselves.” The play further intends to concern the controversy received following the publications of Whitman’s work in the 19th century when same sex relationships were deemed highly immoral.