Features
bella.todd
Site-specific theatre spread from artists’ studios to police cells with the realisation that all the city (and a wee chunk of neighbouring Newhaven) is a stage. Dreamthinkspeak’s Before I Sleep (pictured below), a promenade Festival commission based on The Cherry Orchard, was staged in the derelict Co-op building on London Road. Four floors and 70,000 square feet of disused department store became the canvas for an extraordinary journey from aristocratic isolationism to mass consumerism via the developer’s axe (and several secret portals in cupboards and behind curtains through which the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Martin Amis always had his own idea of who should play John Self, the anti-heroic slob narrator of Money. "The only regret I have in the whole book-to-film department,” he told me, “is that Gary Oldman never played John Self. We had a meeting with Gary and he was so unbelievably good, and so instinctively got the character and made me laugh so violently when he did it, that I thought that was a great shame.” Oldman was even prepared to go the extra mile. “He said, 'I'm going to give up smoking and take up drinking and put on the weight.'" That version never happened. But Money has finally Read more ...
james.woodall
Tonight at the Barbican's Pit, kicking off a run of ten performances, a rather unusual piece of theatre opens. It's not a big play, it probably won't make great waves and it does involve reading surtitles. Called Iram, it's an Israeli adaptation, in Hebrew, of the stories of the Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem. Outside Israel - excluding, at a pinch, bookish circles in transatlantic Jewish communities (Aleichem emigrated from the Ukraine to the US before the First World War) - this prolific chronicler of late 19th-century shtetl life will grace few home libraries. The word "shtetl" might also Read more ...
neil.smith
This slot is always one of the trickiest to fill satisfactorily, though last year’s choice – Pixar’s delightful animation Up – was inspired. Coming on the same day as the film’s release date, alas, Robin’s rain-lashed, Ridley-less premiere felt like a non-event from the get-go, putting the festival on the back foot before it had even begun. Ground was made up the following day thanks to an out of competition showing of Oliver Stone’s belated Wall Street sequel, Money Never Sleeps, a film that, while rather undermined by its perverse determination to de-fang Michael Douglas’s rapacious Gordon Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to go into overdrive in May, that time of the theatrical year when New York stages are at their buzziest in the run-up to the Tony Awards (to be awarded on 13 June). Heavyweight star vehicles (Denzel Washington back on Broadway after five years in Fences) vie for audiences with London imports (Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne in Red), while musicals generate their own considerable clamour: literally so in the case of the Green Day-scored American Idiot, a 95-minute aural immersion that has prompted more delicate members of the show-going public to plump for earplugs. But amidst Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Acclaimed British mezzo Sarah Connolly prepares for the title role in Donizetti's battle royal of rival queens Maria Stuarda. Her return to Opera North in the bel cantorole of her choice will be one of the highlights of the UK opera season and in this revealing podcast she gives fascinating insight into her extensive preparation and "anatomisation" of the roles she performs - right down to the fine detailing here of Mary's temperament and bearing, and even her height.What is going through her head in the moments before the "confrontation" which in reality never actually took place? What Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
With Fela Kuti's old band playing Brighton this evening fronted by his son Seun and on the same bill as Tony Allen, the drummer who co-created the increasingly influential Afro-beat sound, it seemed a good excuse to revisit the first interview I ever got published, which was with the great African pop star in 1984 (in Blitz magazine, also a version for the Observer). A polygamist, with at one point 28 wives, a political and musical revolutionary, Fela was one of the most extraordinary musicians ever to walk the planet.Watch Fela Kuti and his band in 1971Paul McCartney found himself in Lagos Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Filippo Timi plays the young Mussolini of Marco Bellocchio's Vincere as a glowering, virile force of nature. Watching this and his other recent films, it was hard not to think of the Brando of the early 1950s. Timi, too, combines bullish masculine power and delicate sensitivity - he's combustible and magnetic. I was still more sure he was someone special when Gabriele Salvatores, who directed him in As God Commands, mentioned that Timi has a terrible stammer and eyesight so bad he's "almost blind. He can't see and can't speak - the two things an actor needs most," Salvatores said. "But he has Read more ...
edward.seckerson
She was the Tosca who played live to an audience of one billion in 107 countries; she is the director of English National Opera's new staging of the opera they once dubbed Puccini's "shabby little shocker". How times change. In this exclusive ENO podcast, Catherine Malfitano says that it's high time we moved on from the Tosca-as-diva portrayal - that, she says, should remain offstage where Puccini left it.
She talks about the games she plays with her young performers to find a deeper truth and how she draws daily upon the fruits of a glorious career spanning 30-plus years in over 70 roles. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On my previous trip to the Second City in 2009, the much-awaited Art Institute of Chicago extension wasn’t quite ready for visitors, but is now about to celebrate its first birthday, and it’s a treat. The Modern Wing adds 35 per cent more space to the Institute, bringing it up to a nice round one million square feet and making it America’s second biggest art museum after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was designed by Renzo Piano, whose new wing (another glass-and-steel box) will be unveiled at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art later this year; he’s clearly the go-to guy for Read more ...
luiza.sauma
Jews may or may not have built the pyramids, but we know for certain that they built Hollywood. The names of the men who founded MGM, 20th Century Fox and Paramount speak for themselves: Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer, Marcus Loew, Joseph Schenck, William Goetz, Adolph Zukor et al. It's no wonder, then, that Hollywood history overflows with Jewish filmmakers, actors and producers. But for all the Spielbergs, Allens, Hoffmans and Weinsteins, one corner of Jewish life has often escaped the cinema: the world of the Orthodox Jew.Some traditional religious sects such as the Amish in Pennsylvania ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's probably a bit early to start picking the best albums of 2010, but I would seriously consider a legal challenge if Diane Birch's Bible Belt isn't there or thereabouts when the votes are counted. Like a long-lost singer-songwriter classic, it accomplishes the trick of sounding instantly familiar, yet Birch herself doesn't sound quite like any other artist you've heard before. Her voice can be soft and supple, but it also has a raw, rasping quality that can saw through a song like "Choo Choo", with its vamping organ and garage-band guitars. By contrast, in the hymn-like "Forgiveness" she Read more ...