Features
Jasper Rees
It sounds like a joke. These two Jehovah’s Witnesses walk up a garden path. You could, suggests Ross Noble, write it and “give it to someone like Jim Davidson”. Only this one's a true story. A few years ago these two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a man and a woman, walked up Ross Noble’s garden path. For all his big black hair, thick Geordie accent and a face that says "I am a stand-up comic", they evidently had no idea whose door they'd knocked on. “They said, ‘Can we talk to you about God?’ And I said, ‘Go on then.’ We stood on the doorstep for an hour talking and then they came in. I said, ‘Do you Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Miss Marple is frequently described as “a little old lady”, but for all that she casts a giant shadow. Just ask any new actress invited to portray this most beloved of characters. When you play the spinster sleuth, you have massive shoes to fill. That has certainly been Julia McKenzie’s experience.The 68-year-old this week appeared for the first time in the part of Agatha Christie’s much-loved amateur detective. She took over the role from Geraldine McEwan, who retired last year after starring in twelve episodes as Miss Marple. McKenzie admits to jangling nerves beforehand. She was well aware Read more ...
james.rampton
Miss Marple is frequently described as “a little old lady”, but for all that she casts a giant shadow. Just ask any new actress invited to portray this most beloved of characters. When you play the spinster sleuth, you have massive shoes to fill. That has certainly been Julia McKenzie’s experienceThe 68-year-old this week appeared for the first time in the part of Agatha Christie’s much-loved amateur detective. She took over the role from Geraldine McEwan, who retired last year after starring in twelve episodes as Miss Marple. McKenzie admits to jangling nerves beforehand. She was well aware Read more ...
robert.sandall
After the untimely death of its founder, the composer Simon Jeffes 12 years ago, all bets were off as to the likely continuance of the Penguin Café Orchestra. I still remember conversations with various members of the Penguin ensemble in December 1997 at the wake in the house in Somerset where Jeffes spent his final days. The general view then seemed to be that without his presiding influence, the PCO’s music would only survive on record. “Simon stopped us sounding naff,” was cellist Helen Liebmann’s blunt conclusion.As a performing entity, the idiosyncratic Penguin formation – with its Read more ...
josh.spero
Surrounded by a heaving, drinking, swooning, sweating blanket of admirers and professional artworld partygoers, Ryan McGinley has come a long way from the caves he shot for his latest show, Moonmilk, which opened at Alison Jacques Gallery last night. He finds it hard to move without being papped or kissed or having a catalogue thrust into his hand for a dedication. He thought about Jonah and the whale when immersed in taking these pictures, so is it like being inside a whale now, at the opening, with churning crowds and this feeding frenzy? “Absolutely!”The relevance of the whale to his work Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The great Spanish lyric tenor Alfredo Kraus died ten years ago, on 10 September 1999, celebrated by opera epicures, but less well-known to mass consumers of the Three Tenors publicity phenomenon. In 1992, during an engagement at Covent Garden, he spoke frankly to me about the deep issues - and dark politics - he felt were raised when populism took over from taste. This interview was published in the Sunday Telegraph.When The Three Tenors got on stage together in Rome on the humid night of July 7, 1990, the world blinked with gratitude and then rushed to the shops to buy the video. Harmony Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When Carlos Acosta danced Spartacus with the Bolshoi Ballet in London in 2007, the man, the time and the place united the strands of a most extraordinary story in ballet, a story of peregrination, of dreadful reverses, of the pursuit of civilisation, of holding on to the best of human values in despairing times.This might, yes, describe Acosta’s own story (captivatingly told in his new memoir No Way Home, HarperPress) - but there is a more epic tale at issue here. It is the story of a dynasty of very great teachers and performers, the Messerers of Moscow.From Russia to Cuba, from London to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I once asked John Adams the best way to experience his music. "Imagine you're driving on one of those absolutely flat roads in the Midwest where you make out something which turns out to be a grain elevator, or then there's a range of mountains in the distance. The form of my music is as if moving over landscape."It is certainly true that Adams's music is perfect for listening to on trains and planes, with its exhilarating pulse of forward projection and shifting horizons. He once said he would love it if someone saw a typical American scene, such as a gas station at dawn, and said, "That is Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Hunter S Thompson always had one beady, sun-bespectacled eye on posterity. At 21, living in poverty in a remote cabin in the Catskills and toiling away at an autobiographical first novel, Prince Jellyfish (still unpublished), he would immodestly compare his own progress to that of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, two other writers who came late to public recognition.He kept files of self-portraits, which he took by setting the timer on his camera, and was even cataloguing photographs of the many empty rooms in which he had ever lived. An ardent letter-writer, he made carbon copies of Read more ...
sheila.johnston
When Johnny Depp first met Tim Burton, twenty years ago in a Los Angeles coffee shop, he was struck by the otherworldiness of this "pale, frail-looking, sad-eyed man." While the two men traded fragmentary insights about the raw power of velvet Elvis paintings, the nervous young actor marvelled at his new acquaintance’s wide, glaring eyes, his uncontrollable hands, his scarecrow hair. "A comb with legs would have outrun Jesse Owen, given one look at this guy’s locks," recalled Depp later, in his foreword for Faber's excellent collection of interviews with the director. A surreal metaphor Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There aren’t many composers or musicians who can say that they changed society. And by that I mean really changed it. Few have ever come close to materially or politically transforming their surroundings in any truly meaningful way. There are many who claim they have, or wish they had: Wagner or Beethoven in the 19th century, Barenboim most notably – but doubtfully – in our own. But there is only one musician who actually did: the conductor, Kurt Masur.Earlier today, at the German embassy, the Mayor of Leipzig and the Sheriff of the City of London formalised the Barbican’s partnership with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A funny thing happened to the Broadway theatre as the summer drew to a close: every single play except one (The 39 Steps) closed in relatively quick succession, as if to remind showgoers that in New York's main commercial thoroughfare, the musical is king.That wouldn't constitute news were it not for the fact that in the theatre season just gone, it was the play that remained the talking point throughout a 2008/9 Broadway lineup that saw the unexpected presence of Chekhov, Ionesco, Beckett, Ayckbourn, and Schiller in the playhouses studded across Manhattan's West 40s and 50s. And that Read more ...