Reviews
Veronica Lee
The people behind ITV's Show Me the Funny – a sort of X Factor for comics – have, as part of the prize for those who reached last month's final, launched a short UK tour for its winner, Patrick Monahan, and the two runners-up, Tiffany Stevenson and Dan Mitchell. It may be that this show, which I saw at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London, suffered from being filmed for the DVD (to be released in November) but by golly was it long, boring and, for the most part, laughter-free.First up was Mitchell, a young Welshman who failed to raise much more than an occasional smile with his quotidian Read more ...
ash.smyth
Language is, the sages tell us, intrinsic to being human. Or to what humans call “being human”, anyway. And yet, notwithstanding the 70-odd muscles and half a billion brain cells deployed every time we open our mouths, we hardly give the matter a second thought. I confess I was in two minds about committing to five hours of Stephen Fry telling me this; but as the opening credits rolled last night on Fry's Planet Word, before I'd even got my feet up and my tea on, while he was still saying "the story of language is surely one of the greatest stories we have” – I knew we were Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Some countries have a particular talent for choral music. Georgia, for example, has wonderful choirs, as does South Africa and, it seems, Bulgaria. Unfortunately, due to the expense of touring, we hardly get to see them. So when Le Mystère de Voix Bulgares, the female choir who embody the strange and powerful music of their homeland, came to town last night, lovers of global choral music were out in force.How they came to be here is a curious tale. The music, while based on folk singing, was actually a Soviet-era idea of creating a national musical language. In 1952 Philip Koutev created the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
After producing an overwhelming performance of Mahler’s colossal Second Symphony, rewarded by a 10-minute standing ovation from a packed house, the new chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic could not be accused of easing himself into the job. One might have thought that Juanjo Mena (pronounced Huanho Mayna, being Basque) might have started off with a splash of Spanish colour, with Rodrigo and De Falla, which must be in his blood. But no, although that will come in his next concert.Clearly, he has chosen to put down a strong marker straightaway – the Resurrection. Mind you, he isn’t new to Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are several types of garden opera, and there are also, happily, several types of cinema opera. You can rustle your Werthers through a relay from the Met and endure the touchy-feely interviews with panting mega-sopranos just out of Verdi’s “Sempre libera”; or you can pick up a small touring company like Mid Wales Opera at the Pontardawe Arts Centre or the Aberdare Coliseum, and watch real opera sung by human beings in unhelpful surroundings. I know which I prefer; but then I have a weakness for adaptability. And this MWO Madam Butterfly, which I caught up with at the Roses Theatre in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Irene (Carey Mulligan) realises just how much the Driver (Ryan Gosling) loves her as his boot caves in a man’s face on the floor of her apartment building lift. They have just kissed for the first time, and she tumbles from him, shaken and repelled. But she can’t stay away, and neither can he, in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Cannes prize-winning tragic action romance.As its nameless hero, Gosling doesn’t speak for Drive’s first 10 minutes, and is so still in one early scene he looks plastic, only a flick of a finger confirming he breathes, let alone sweats. We see him move smoothly between three Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It has been four years since Alan Carr toured with a live show, and he's been much missed from the circuit. From his first appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe when he entertained audiences with tales of his past life as a call-centre worker and being the woefully non-sporty son of a football-manager father, he was destined for stardom.Television appearances – game shows, quizzes and chat shows – followed, and despite his huge recent success I think producers have not yet managed to find the right vehicle for the ever-smiling and hugely engaging Carr. He follows in a line of a certain Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“Are there any freshers in the audience?" asked Emma-Lee Moss halfway through last night’s set. Two voices raised a muted cheer. Whatever else your average 18-year-old might have been doing, cut loose from the apron strings for the first time in the capital city on a Friday night, they were unlikely to be listening to music this polite and well behaved. Or so you’d hope.She may be less widely heralded than Laura Marling, but both women have recently been doing their utmost to transcend the creative straitjacket of middle-class nu-folk girls-with-guitars. This, oddly, has left Moss's music Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books 1 and 2 Roger Woodward - piano (Celestial Harmonies)Possibly the most expansive Well-Tempered Clavier around – this one just tips over onto five discs, but there’s never any suggestion of sluggishness. Roger Woodward has been mentioned in these pages before – Australian born, he came to prominence in the 1970s as an interpreter of the thorniest modern repertoire. But he’s never neglected the core piano repertoire, releasing revelatory recordings of Chopin, Debussy and Beethoven during the past decade alongside excursions into more offbeat territory. He Read more ...
ash.smyth
After the international success of Not Here to Be Loved, Stéphane Brizé returns with a delicate, sentimental tale of small-town life disrupted when French builder Jean meets Véronique Chambon, his son's junior-school teacher.And, er, that's it. Pretty much. Jean (Vincent Lindon) doesn't manage his emotions very well (doesn't even seem to realise them for the most part); Véronique (Sandrine Kiberlain, pictured above) - a slightly insipid, freckly figure - doesn't do much better; Jean's wife Anne Marie (Aure Atika) gets a little suspicious. Some... thing... happens... But Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Education, education, education. Have we ever worried so much about how, and what, and why, and where our children are being taught? We’re so desperate, it seems, for some guidance on the matter that we barely raise an eyebrow about turning their trials and tribulations into fodder for reality television. Never mind the dubious ethics, we might learn something.Educating Essex is a seven-part fly-on-the-blackboard documentary examining life for the teachers and Year 11 pupils at Passmores Secondary School in Harlow, Essex. The access, we were told, was impressive. I could think of some other Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It took a long time for architects to embrace popular culture. I attended a talk at the Architectural Association in the mid 1970s, when someone (probably the architect Robert Venturi) waxed lyrical about shiny American diners and hot-dog stands shaped like Frankfurters and extolled the virtues of the madcap fantasies built in Las Vegas."Dazed by desert sun and dazzled by signs, between loving and hating what we saw, we were both jolted clear out of our aesthetic skins," wrote Venturi’s partner Denise Scott-Brown of their American road trip. A nervous buzz of excitement swept the room; Read more ...