It was surprising to hear Suede were going on the road one last time before calling it a day. Many of us thought they'd split up years ago.

Like all bands fatally rooted in a specific period - in this case the early 1990s and the first stirrings of Britpop - it felt faintly ludicrous that they should still be making music a decade later.

The record-buying masses appear to concur. An eternity has elapsed since Suede's sleazy glam-pop troubled the charts while a new greatest hits album won't be causing Coldplay or the Strokes lost sleep.

This farewell tour was less a lap of honour then than a bittersweet goodbye to fans who stayed the course. With album tracks and recent, somewhat unfamiliar, 45s dominating, Suede clearly had an eye on posterity. It obviously troubles them to be regarded as a fantastic singles act never quite able to cut it over the longer format. Their chagrin is justified; Suede leave behind at least two classic records and deserve more than to be dismissed as flash in the pan Ziggy Stardust-clones.

Despite - or perhaps because of - their imminent demise, the five-piece turned in a storming set. Frontman Brett Anderson in particular flung himself into the performance. Although his profile has dimmed, he remains a luminescent showman. Curiously ageless, with sunken cheekbones and whippet-thin frame, he looked like a physical manifestation of everything Suede once claimed to stand for - fey and otherworldly, yet with the air of a veteran hedonist.

It would be nice to report that the audience lapped up the obscurities that peppered the show, but the truth is that most had come for the half-dozen or so hits Suede clocked up in the mid-1990s. In the end they relented, throwing out a glistening She's in Fashion, a livewire Thrash and a glammed up New Generation. As a quivering Still Life closed the encore, you found yourself missing them already. - Ed Power

Cinderella

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

The Gaiety's pantomime formula, in structure and style, varies little from year to year, but the cast and characters are not immutable. As a major example, the imported celebrity this time is Ronnie Drew as Barron Stoneybroke, father of Cinderella and the two Ugly Sisters. He ambles cheerfully through the proceedings, offering such numbers as I'll Tell Me Ma When I get Home and The Irish Rover, which have more to do with pub singing than with a fairytale. And he is, of course, great.

Similarly with the brothers Grennell, Nicholas and Michael, as the Uglies. They are both experienced actors, and create two monstrous women who are painfully laughter-inducing. They harass Cinders, pester the men and pretend to reform at the end; but we know better. BillieTraynor is a kookie Fairy Godmother with a Brooklyn accent and a Jewish rhythm in her prose. She does her stuff con brio. Richie Hayes, practically a staple constituent in the annual diet, is here again as Buttons. He sings, dances and gets the audience going, taking a comic lead in the action. He is also the chief culprit in the perpetuation of a number here called The Song Sheet, which requires the audience to divide into left and right, and compete in the raucous howling of an elementary song. To finish, he turns on inoffensive adults who have chosen to remain seated, and forces them into embarrassed participation. Yikes! David O'Meara is also excellent as Dandini, the Prince's comic aide. Susan McFadden is an appropriately graceful and tuneful Cinderella, and Killian Donnelly is a romantic Prince Charming.

This is the most lavish, professional and best-choreographed pantomime (director Daryn Crosbie) I have seen at the Gaiety, as well as the most decibel-indulgent. My head still hurts. - Gerry Colgan

The Star Catcher

Lyric Theatre, Belfast

The Lyric's Christmas show for children is short, sweet and rather slight - 45 minutes of magic, illusion and physical theatre performed by three of the most talented exponents of the art, Seamus Allen, Mike Moloney and Sheelagh O'Kane.

There are high expectations of a show created jointly by Paul Bosco McEneaney and Zoe Seaton. Top of the list are charm, colour, inventiveness and high performance standards - which we get. Next comes a strong storyline and characterisations - which we do not get. Without the latter, the story of how a star is caught, sought after and returned to the heavens, becomes merely a vehicle for some (admittedly nifty) illusions.

Conor Mitchell's jaunty score jollies things along, as does John Riddell's rainbow-coloured lighting of Stuart Marshall's unusually solid and unimaginative set - a compromise, one wonders, with the need to accommodate on the same stage the second Christmas show, which opens next week?

Thanks to feats of incredible agility by the engaging Allen and plenty of warm-hearted mischief from Moloney's long, lanky Star Catcher and O'Kane's plump little café owner Martha, the audience is kept enthralled by McEneaney's stage trickery. And the final trick of the evening is guaranteed to melt every heart in the auditorium, with the unexpected appearance of the sweetest little guest star imaginable. -   Jane Coyle

The Star Catcher is at the Lyric until January 3rd. Bookings at: Belfast 048 9038 1081.

Kate Boyd (piano)

Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin

Crawford-Seeger: Preludes (exc); Elaine Agnew: Big Sky; Sofia Gubaidulina: Chaconne; Galina Ustvolskaya: Sonata No. 6.

Kate Boyd is a pianist who recently moved to Dublin, and who in her native US has a reputation with contemporary music. On the evidence of this Bank of Ireland Mostly Modern concert one could see why, for her playing commands attention and respect, even when one has doubts about details.

For example, the sustaining pedal was used too heavily in Ruth Crawford-Seeger's Preludes for Piano. These richly coloured, atmospheric pieces were composed in the 1920s, and it was unfortunate that the pedalling obscured their dissonant, distinctive part-writing.

Elaine Agnew's The Big Sky dates from 1999 and is inspired by the "vastness and contrast" she found in Alberta, Canada. It wears technique on its sleeve; and its incessant, sometimes witty reworking of precise material gives much of it the character of a harum-scarum series of variations.

However, technique runs away with itself, for the piece is considerably longer than its taut ideas can sustain.

The most rewarding music in the concert came from two living Russian composers. Gubaidulina's Chaconne (1963) is well on its way to becoming a classic of 20th-century piano repertoire. The way it puts together its long sequences of variations, some at differing speeds, shows a panache and intellect worthy of Busoni.

In Ustvolskaya's Sonata No. 6 and in the Gubaidulina, Kate Boyd put to good use her ability to sustain long-range rhythmic energy. In both pieces, the playing was compelling - although there are more subtle ways of conveying this sonata's apocalyptic power. -  Martin Adams