Talk of the town this weekend is Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy's stage version of The Pianist, which opens for a two-week run at the stunning Manchester International Festival today. Misha has written a piece in The Guardian's arts blog about how/why he's doing this, and there is an excellent feature in The Sunday Times too.
The show has already had tremendous success in France, capturing the public imagination in a very positive, encouraging way (it's not all Kismet out there, thank God). Combining music and words is far more difficult that it looks, and Misha and his team appear to have hit the nail right on the head.