Push! (2006)
Take a deep breath, grab the gas and air and join us on a roller coaster journey through one of the most extreme, yet most commonplace dramas that a human being can go through.
With breathtaking music from the 13 strong orchestra, ingenious words, scintillating performances and Tête à Tête’s hallmark theatricality, you will enter the minds of six very different women at the very moment they give birth.
You will smile, laugh, cry, bill and coo, gurgle with pleasure and choke with emotion until the series of episodes climaxes with a celebration of the pure power and life force bound up in every labouring mother.
“Cara” from Push!
Developed by Aldeburgh Productions through the second Genesis Opera Project and presented in association with the Genesis Foundation
“Push! is a wonderfully entertaining small-scale piece of music theatre with a score by David Bruce and a libretto by Anna Reynolds…Bruce’s score, conducted by Tim Murray, is buoyantly inventive…the versatile cast of eight performs with irresistible panache…Push! certainly delivers.”
Rupert Chistiansen, Daily Telegraph, 23 June 06 (Tête à Tête also received the ‘Best of 2006’ award from Rupert Chistiansen for Push! and Odysseus Unwound)
“This was a dazzling show by any standards…Push! is simply brilliant from start to finish. But above all it’s humane. Sensitive ideas cascade and catapult forth, but the most gleaming item of all is Bruce’s fresh and original music, which from a small ensemble produces a wonderfully bizarre mix of the coherent and the unpredictable.”
Roderic Dunnett, Opera Now, Nov/Dec 06
“Sometimes Bruce’s writing comes close to operatic genius (a bittersweet love scene without words is very affecting) …With a clutch of uniformly excellent performances, it makes for a consistently surprising, brilliantly inventive and fast-paced show.”
Warwick Thompson, Metro, 21 June 06
Read the independent evaluation of PUSH!
Download the PUSH! Programme
Composer: David Bruce
Librettist: Anna Reynolds
Director: Bill Bankes-Jones
Designer: Tim Meacock
Conductor: Tim Murray
Lighting: Ian Scott
Cast:
Tara Harrison
Rachel Hynes
Jacqueline Miura
Helen Wither
Louise Mott
Richard Coxon
James Edwards
Mark Richardson
Orchestra:
Violin 1 Helena Wood
Cello: Miriam Lowbury
Double Bass: Elena Hull
Flute: Katie Bicknell
Clarinet: Stuart King
Bassoon: Matthew Dodd
Trumpet: Joe Sharp
Horn: Evgeny Chebykin
Trombone: Roger Williams
Piano: Daniel Becker
Accordion: Ian Watson
Percussion: Stephen Gibson
Composer: David Bruce
Librettist: Anna Reynolds
Director: Bill Bankes-Jones
Designer: Tim Meacock
Conductor: Tim Murray
Lighting: Ian Scott
Cast:
Tara Harrison
Rachel Hynes
Jacqueline Miura
Helen Wither
Louise Mott
Richard Coxon
James Edwards
Mark Richardson
Orchestra:
Violin 1 Helena Wood
Cello: Miriam Lowbury
Double Bass: Elena Hull
Flute: Katie Bicknell
Clarinet: Stuart King
Bassoon: Matthew Dodd
Trumpet: Joe Sharp
Horn: Evgeny Chebykin
Trombone: Roger Williams
Piano: Daniel Becker
Accordion: Ian Watson
Percussion: Stephen Gibson