● IT MIGHT SAVE EVERYONE a bit of money and effort to display the following woo-alert before any film, play, TV show, opera etc older than about 20 years: The past happened! Get over it — or piss off. The thought was prompted by exciting news that Covent Garden has frotted away a year, and countless thousands of quid, making Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly more “authentic” — a pursuit as obviously vain and wretched as hiring a Mandarin accent-coach for Chu Chin Chow.
You’d hope they might at
