sun 26/05/2013

Reviews

Muse, Emirates Stadium

Russ Coffey

For all the video projections and pyrotechnics that accompanied it, Muse’s entrance onto the Emirates stage last night was disappointingly anticlimactic. This was partly because there was still so much daylight  in the stadium but, mainly, it was down to there being so many empty seats. Maybe earlycomers had been driven to the bar by support act Dizzee Rascal’s constant refrains of "are you going to go fucking mental?” Or possibly it was just a bad day on the tube. Whatever the truth, the...

David Bowie - Five Years, BBC Two

Adam Sweeting

Picking five creatively significant years was quite a smart way of tackling the huge career of David Bowie, though you could argue forever about whether producer/director Francis Whately had chosen the right ones. What about 1969 and the Space Oddity album, or 1970 and The Man Who Sold the World? How about a really bad year like 1987, which gave us Never Let Me Down and the egregious Glass Spider tour?But the film is what it is rather than what it isn't, and most of what we got was fascinating...

Berezovsky, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Järvi...

David Nice

In 1980, an orchestra and conductor then hardly known in Britain came to the Royal Festival Hall. I went to hear Elisabeth Söderström in Strauss’s...

Neko Case/Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Village...

Lisa-Marie Ferla

Neko Case wasn't about to launch a Yeah Yeah Yeahs-style pre-emptive strike aimed at the Village Underground's amateur camera-wielders. She doesn't...

Raven Girl, Royal Ballet/ Witch-Hunt, Bern...

Ismene Brown

Ballet is telling stories again. Last night Wayne McGregor’s debut as a narrator followed hot on the heels of Cathy Marston’s Witch-Hunt for Bern...

Classical CDs Weekly: Frank Martin, Mei Yi Foo, Powerplant

Graham Rickson

A Grimm take on Cinderella, a brilliant anthology of contemporary piano music and some head-banging percussion

Lohengrin, Welsh National Opera

Stephen Walsh

WNO in their element in wide-stage Wagner marred by vocal problems

The Tudors Season, BBC Two

Jasper Rees

Mantel goes head to head with Starkey as Henry VIII executes everyone all over again for our pleasure

The Hangover Part III

Veronica Lee

Subdued finale for the laddish franchise

Metro: Last Light

Simon Munk

The dark, the mutants and the other survivors – fear rules this bleak first-person shooter

To Kill A Mockingbird, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre

Demetrios Matheou

London ain't Alabama, but Harper Lee's attack on racial intolerance still resonates

Steve Earle, Royal Festival Hall

Tim Cumming

Passion and politics as country's great polymath tours a powerful new album with a powerful new band

Rob Newman, Little Angel Theatre

Veronica Lee

Not quite rock 'n' roll, but I like it

Disgraced, Bush Theatre

Aleks Sierz

Pulitzer Prize-winning drama examines cultural identity with insight and intelligence

Something in the Air

Jasper Rees

Olivier Assayas recalls his heady, heavy days as a soixante-huitard

The Kite Runner, Theatre Royal Brighton

Bella Todd

A story-centric stage adaption of Khaled Hosseini's sentimental best-seller

The King of Marvin Gardens

Graham Fuller

Melancholy meets irrational optimism in Bob Rafelson's New Hollywood classic

Relatively Speaking, Wyndham's Theatre

Matt Wolf

Early Ayckbourn play fizzes anew 46 years on

Sylvie Guillem, 6000 Miles Away, Sadler's Wells Theatre

Ismene Brown

Guillem weaves her game-changing magic in Forsythe and Ek

Limbo, Southbank Centre

Jasper Rees

London Wonderground's erotic circus bumps and grinds

Lubomyr Melnyk, Village Underground

Kieron Tyler

The pioneer of continuous music astonishes while Bon Iver’s preferred artist Gregory Euclide paints live, on stage

Helen Chadwick, Richard Saltoun

Sarah Kent

Her obsession with death and decay was leavened by a wicked sense of humour

Case Histories, BBC One

Veronica Lee

The brooding private detective is back

Falstaff, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Kimon Daltas

Comedy is king in a Falstaff revival which is consistently enjoyable but could be a little less nice

The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women, BBC Four

Tom Birchenough

The welcome return of the legacy of photographer Erwin Blumenfeld

Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Edward Seckerson

Strauss's opera reluctantly enters the Battle of Britain courtesy of a young German director

Reissue CDs Weekly: Scott Walker

Kieron Tyler

Easy listening and continental European intellectualism combine on the early albums from pop’s wilful auteur

Say It With Flowers, Sherman Theatre, Cardiff

Gary Raymond

New play about tragic Welsh diva Dorothy Squires misses the real story

Mariele Neudecker, Regency Town House, Brighton

Fisun Güner

The German artist plays with notions of the Romantic sublime

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