Latest news with #Adina
Irish Examiner
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Opera review: INO take on l'Elisir d'Amore provides ridiculously good fun
l'Elisir d'Amore, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, ★★★★★ If you ever meet someone who claims opera is boring and unfun, send them to Cal McCrystal's wacky and wild (west) take on Donizetti's endearing love comedy l'Elisir d'Amore. Send them right now! His production for Irish National Opera is ridiculously good fun, and hasn't a boring moment across a riotous, good-humoured, saucy and physical two-and-a-half hours. We're used to classic opera getting far-flung, anachronistic settings. It's one of the main tools in the director's bag when it comes to reinvigorating or reinterpreting works we think we know all too well. An excellent 2013 Northern Ireland Opera version of this was set in a 1950s American highschool, for instance. Subtract about a 100 years from that, and you have McCrystal's time and place. Chorus numbers become hoedowns, Abraham Lincoln appears in the theatre (and even survives all the way to the curtain), while Claudia Boyle's Adina becomes a Scarlett O'Hara-type figure. But McCrystal doesn't stop there. He piles on the visual gags: there's a couple who've stepped out of American Gothic, pitchfork and all; a Laurel and Hardy japering about; and Keystone cops bungling in and out. Bass baritone John Molloy was a delight as the quack doctor Dulcamara in the 2013 staging. Here, his brand of sardonic, knowing humour is given even more rein as a Wild West snake oil salesman. He gets a speaking part too, where he introduces and comments on the action, ably assisted by his factotum Truffaldino. Ian O'Reilly brings great craft to that speaking role. His incarnation of a ventriloquist's dummy at one point is a real hoot. Gianluca Margheri, Claudia Boyle and Duke Kim in l'Elisir d'Amore. Picture: Ros Kavanagh It's exactly what you'd expect from McCrystal, whose physical comedy credits include the Paddington films and One Man, Two Guvnors. His brand of slapstick rather misfired in the Abbey's revival of Lennox Robinson's Drama at Inish in 2019, but he never misses a trick here. Of McCrystal's numerous movie references, the hardest to miss is Nemorino, Dulcamara's sucker for the titular love potion, and besotted with Adina. He's dressed precisely as Woody from Toy Story, with tenor Duke Kim following the cue of that getup. He accentuates his character's naivety all the way up to an innocently poignant take on the famed aria Una Furtiva Lagrima. The keen-eyed will spot not "Andy" written on the sole of his foot, but 'Adina', a typically acute detail in Sarah Bacon's superb costumes, which she casts against a relatively sparse, cactus-dotted set. Sara Jane Sheils' lighting is inspired by the shifting tones you'd see in the prairie sky, and neatly marks the progress of time in a plot that hinges on what will or won't happen today or tomorrow. Amid the uniformly excellent cast, Boyle shows her acting and singing chops to equal measure, delivering comedy, pathos, and sparkle as needed, and singing astoundingly throughout. Gianluca Margheri is charisma itself as Nemorino's rival Belcore, musclebound and really not afraid to show us! His interactions with a chorus full of delineated characters is great fun. Throughout, the words and lines bounce along as the score is deftly marshalled by Erina Yashima, leading the INO orchestra in lively form.
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Amid the alien corn: Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino
'I am an Adina,' the four-year-old protagonist of Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland writes to her extraterrestrial superiors on Planet Cricket Rice, which is light years away from Earth. 'Yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass,' she adds, using the fax machine her mother retrieved from their neighbour's trash. 'DESCRIBE BUNNIES,' they respond, sparking a dialogue that continues well into her adulthood. Adina's premature birth in September 1977 coincided with the departure of the Voyager 1 probe, which was launched with a phonograph record of sounds intended to explain human life to intelligent extra-terrestrials. The timing is significant because Adina was sent to Earth from Planet Cricket Rice to report on human life. Or so she thinks – for speculative fiction, Beautyland, which takes its title from a 'dash-to-in-a-pinch supply store that contains what humans believe are necessities', is strongly grounded in realism. Bertino's third novel, published in the US last year, intersperses Adina's story with news flashes from the intergalactic front line, from the 1991 discovery of exoplanets outside our solar system to the 2017 revelation of the interstellar asteroid Oumuamua. Like E.T. (Adina will later watch the film at the cinema, bemoaning the choice of popcorn – 'the loudest sound on Earth'– as the official food of movie-watching), she longs to return home. She has faith that this will happen, despite growing up in north-eastern Pennsylvania with her single Sicilian mother, Térèse. Adina keeps her alien existence mainly to herself, but before quitting college to move to New York she tries to tell Térèse the truth:
Yahoo
26-01-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
'I felt jealous of mums who still had their mothers'
A North Yorkshire mum has set up a support group for mums whose own mothers have died. Louise Kirby-Jones, 33, from Malton is co-founder of the network Motherless Mothers alongside psychotherapist Adina Belloli. Ms Kirby-Jones set up the group after her son was born and she found raising him without the support of her own mother brought up unexpected challenges. Six weeks after having her son, she wrote on a Facebook forum asking other women if they knew of support for mothers who didn't have their own mums around and Ms Belloli replied. "Adina was the light that responded to my desperate message," she says. "We instantly got on. Adina's story is really different to mine. Her mother was killed in an accident by a drunk driver when she was six months old so Adina never knew her mum, so we've come at this from very different perspectives." Ms Kirby-Jones' mother Angela Kirby died in June 2012 after routine heart surgery. "The surgery that was supposed to save her didn't, so she came through the surgery and she took a dip and didn't make it," she says. "I was 20, sort of on the cusp of adulthood but I didn't have the independence that a lot of adults have. I didn't have my own finances or home or a car. "I was still quite childlike and definitely quite childlike in my position in the family. "It was like being on a ghost train that just didn't stop. But I do remember this sense of wanting to keep things as normal as possible. "If I crashed and burned at 20, I didn't feel there was very much hope so I did try and keep up appearances." Her father died just 11 months later from cancer. "His health deteriorated and it was difficult to tell if it was grief or something quite a lot more serious medically. "The ghost train it just kept going and it didn't stop." When she became pregnant about 10 years later, her two elder sisters warned her that it would be a challenging time. And she very quickly felt a "gap". She says: "Expecting a baby was one of the most joyous things of my life and I was so excited to become a mum, but I knew what lay ahead of me in terms of the tough stuff. "I knew to expect this onset of emotions that was going to come through hormonal changes but I was also preparing to come to a time of life where people do naturally become closer to their in-laws or parents because that help is so needed. "I felt it early on. I felt a gap. I felt different. I felt extremely jealous of other women who had what I so desperately wanted." Motherless Mothers is intended to help fill that gap – whether mums are grieving their mothers or estranged from them. "We are a community of mothers who are mothering without the love and support and care of our own mothers," says Ms Kirby-Jones. "Some women are motherless by death, but some women are motherless by circumstances such as illness, mothers who have dementia or are disabled and so they're not able to have those relationships with their mums that they would have liked to have had. "There's also motherless by choice because some women need to step away from that relationship they have with their mother because it's not safe or healthy for them. "They all need to be empowered and that's what we're here to do." The community group provides resources such as articles, guides, book recommendations and self-care tools. It is also planning to do advocacy work in the future – creating public awareness campaigns of the challenges motherless mothers face, training healthcare professionals and advocating for change in government and the NHS. Ms Kirby-Jones says she thinks her mum would be proud of this work. "I know she would be devastated that her death had such a profound impact on us, but that's because we loved her so much. "She would be thrilled that from something so awful we are turning it into something really powerful. "We always say she was like Princess Diana, she was very mild and calm in temperament. "Everyone's mums are special in some ways. I do feel my mum was very special. But I probably now only appreciate quite how special she was now that she's not here. Calm, gentle but secretly very strong." Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here. Bereaved sister sets up suicide support group Men's mental health support group plans expansion
