Cultured coastal capers - The Jewish Chronicle

Make sure you put aside some time in May and June to head down to Brighton. Aside from its pier, pebble beach and some quite frankly bizarre installations, there will be hundreds of weird, wonderful and raucous events encompassing music, theatre, dance, circus, art, film, literature, debate and family events. Venues across Brighton and Hove will be buzzing with activity and all this will be squeezed into two months during its arts festival (May 7-29) and fringe festival (May 6–June 5).

Brighton's Arts Festival, now in its 50th year, has traditionally appointed high profile guest directors as diverse as the celebrated poet and writer Michael Rosen and actress Vannessa Redgrave.

This year the festival will be under the guest direction of American-born experimental artist and musician Laurie Anderson.

She has set up Lou Reed Drones, a free installation of her late husband's guitars and amps in feedback mode. Her 20-minute musical for dogs and their owners will have its UK premiere alongside mainstream films, a slide show and immersive theatre in which audience members are invited to act as undercover police officers.

Anderson said: "Brighton Festival is so big and sprawling and exciting, and there's so many different things going on - it really has a kind of celebratory, crazy art party feel to it."

The Globe Theatre on Tour is celebrating 400 years since Shakespeare's death with Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Brighton Open Air Theatre. Marc Rees impersonates James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, the famous Shakespearian scholar in Digging for Shakespeare while Shakespeare's Globe and Seabright Productions speak of Romeo and Titus stories untold. Spymonkey and Tim Crouch will be there too to present the 74 onstage deaths in the Bard's plays, The Complete Deaths, at the historic Theatre Royal.

The National Theatre of Scotland's Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour will be putting on a musical play about being young, lost and off the rails, and La Nuova Musica's concert production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Ann Murray.

On a more breezy note, the Charles Lineham Company returns with a double bill of dance, and Nederlands Dans Theater are showcasing its young international dancers. Akram Khan returns with his dance show Until the Lions - his dancers are accompanied by musicians who provide a most haunting range of vocals and soundscape.

Singer and songwriter Laura Mvula performs at the Theatre Royal and Hacienda Classical give house and club classics performed by DJs Graeme Park and Mike Pickering.

The Ricochet Project New Mexico presents Smoke and Mirrrors, using contemporary circus to explore the human condition, an exquisite display of differences in social standing with poetic acrobatics. Among the cabaret items is Liz Aggiss with Slap and Tickle, a ribald commentary on sexual taboos.

Also look out for Howard Jacobson who will be discussing his new book Shylock is My Name.

The Fringe is hosting 900 events including a play by David Mamet, A Good Jew, which features a Jewish pianist and Aryan violinist in Terezin and The Half Life of Love, by local playwright Gail Louw. There is a Fringe all-nighter and the usual tasters at Festival weekends in New Road.

The children's programme includes the return of Adriano Adewale's Catapluf's Musical Journey. For two days the A Weekend without Walls programme offers free family fun, where children help the lost horse find its carousel and everyone can blast off with Highly Sprung's Urban Astronaut.

Among 30 free things to do is Tangled Feet's presentation of Emergency, about displaced people, and Our Future City: Imagining our creative future.

A major exhibition, Stage Screen and Trench, a Sussex Story of World War 1, runs throughout the Fringe.

As it coincides with the 250th anniversary of Brighton Jewry, there will be a bus tour of Jewish interest on Fringe Sundays as well as guided tours of Brighton and Hove's historic synagogue at Middle Street with a concert by the London Jewish Male Voice Choir. A visiting Israeli troupe, Worse Case Scenario, will be spotlighting conflicts from a new perspective.

Finally, at the nearby Charleston Festival (May 20-30) you can see Eileen Atkins, Andrew Marr and Nicholas Hytner. And as an added incentive to visit, the city will run Artist Open House weekends between April 30 and May 30.