Reviews
Simon Thompson
When I first started attending the Edinburgh International Festival in the 1990s, the Opening Concert (capitals intentional) was a grand Usher Hall affair on a Sunday evening; a central work of the western classical tradition to set the festival running. Not any more. They’ve steadily moved the opening of the festival forwards over the years (the first of 2024’s preview events took place last Thursday) and this year the opening concerts take place over not one but two nights.The theme that director Nicola Benedetti has chosen for this year’s festival is Rituals that unite us, and the opening Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I think my dad might have been an alien,” Adam (Faraz Ayub; Line of Duty; Screw) tells a self-help group he wanders into. What does that make him? He doesn’t feel at home anywhere – not with his family or, perhaps not surprisingly, at his job in a burger bar at Sky Peals motorway services.And in fact he is almost homeless: his white mother (Claire Rushbrook) is moving out of their flat with her new man, to Herefordshire - "Where's that?" he asks vaguely. She wants him to pack up his things but he stays in front of his computer, transfixed, while they take his bed apart, and carries on Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Emma Sidi Is Sue Gray Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★I have no idea what Sue Gray - the former senior civil servant who is now The Prime Minister’s right-hand woman - sounds like, but I’m guessing not someone who has stepped straight out of The Only Way Is Essex.Hilariously, and to great effect, that is character comic Emma Sidi’s presentation of a woman finding herself at the heart of government without really knowing why.“The last four years have been mental!” says “Sue Gray” as she introduces herself - Sue Gray refers to herself in the third person frequently, and always with her full name Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“One charming night gives more delight than a hundred lucky days”. So claims one of the gorgeous (and, in this case, risqué) numbers that stud Purcell’s “semi-opera” The Fairy Queen like sequins on a flamboyant party gown.Directed by tenor-turned-conductor Paul Agnew (pictured below), the Baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants – together with singers from its sister company Le Jardin des Voix and dancers from Compagnie Käfig – certainly threw one hell of a Proms party. The illustrious French group’s all-dancing, all-singing, hip-hop-flavoured remake of Purcell’s loose riff on A Midsummer Night Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Eric Rushton, Monkey Barrel @ The Hive ★★★★ Eric Rushton tells us he has enough cash on him to return the price of one person’s ticket if they don’t like what’s about to follow. No one takes up the offer, although I suspect a few in the audience may have taken a few minutes to tune into his individual style of comedy.Essentially Real One is a shaggy dog story that uses a surreal hook – a vivid dream the comic had about the actress Margot Robbie – to examine regrets, embarrassment and a life that’s yet to take off.Rushton intersperses his account of that dream – in which he managed to Read more ...
David Nice
Not everyone knew what to expect from this fascinating programme. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, last of his orchestral masterpieces, is nothing like the more familiar aspects of his piano concertos. Nor is Busoni’s nominal attempt at the form, which seems more of a Symphony-Concerto than anything else, and style-wise impossible to pin down. Both works had the fullest care and focus last night.It felt counter-intuitive to have Rachmaninov's very personal swansong in the first half; if some of us couldn't quite tune in to the depths at first, that was no fault of the performance. Edward Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Brighton’s Preston Park came alive this weekend in the most magnificently colourful, sparkling and diverse celebration of love in all its forms for the UK's most famous LGBTQ+ community fundraiser.Saturday was the more hedonistic affair, seeing the finest (and smallest) costumes, rainbow paint and general indulgence, with all the glamour and glitter to rival a spectacular line up including The House Gospel Choir and disco Queen Sophie Ellis Bextor. American actor and singer Billy Porter showcased some fabulous moves and music, including hit “Children” and debuting “Black Mona Lisa”, a funky Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A Chorus Line reigned supreme on Broadway from 1975 to 1990, a bold, bare-bones piece that for once put musical theatre’s hoofers in the spotlight. “As welcome as a rainbow after a thunderstorm” was Clive Barnes’s summation in the New York Times.It was there when Aids began to decimate theatre-land, taking its creator, Michael Bennett, in 1987 too. It was a show that acknowledged the flesh and blood performers who went on making the magic happen and lent them added poignancy. And it presumably did so again in 2021, when the Curve Leicester created this production as a one-finger salute to Read more ...
David Kettle
The Mosinee Project, Underbelly Cowgate ★★★★In May 1950, a small US town awoke to hammer-and-sickle flags hanging from lamp-posts, its local newspaper transformed into a Soviet propaganda journal, its citizens’ firearms confiscated and handed to loyal communist troops, and – most alarmingly – its mayor detained under armed guard.It’s a fascinating and little-known byway of US history, and how the Wisconsin community of Mosinee arrived at that elaborate and eyebrow-raising simulation is the subject of the debut Fringe show from new theatre company Counterfactual. And what begins with a Read more ...
David Nice
The buildings, 13th-16th century, are earlier than the music (mostly Baroque). And what buildings. Non-Estonians like myself had heard that Haapsalu was a fine seaside town; but tourist publicity neglected the glory of the castle and cathedral, a central festival venue. If Livonians, Germans, Swedes and Russians all passed through, enriching and destroying, this most perfect of small festivals now welcomes international musicians to perform alongside world-class Estonians.Since musicologist, conductor and Artistic Director Toomas Siitan founded the festival in 1994, making it one of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anna Akana, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ If you like morbid humour, you’ve come to the right place. Asian American comic Anna Akana, a YouTube star making her Fringe debut, dives in at the deep end with It Gets Darker, which deals with, inter alia, her sister’s suicide.But before we get there, Akana sets the scene. She has returned to comedy after several years away, having left the scene because she was threatened by a long-term stalker who the LAPD told her they couldn’t arrest until he did something. As awful as it was, she acknowledges that having a stalker is great material for a comic. “My Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Does John Wilson ever stumble?The Sinfonia of London, the Gateshead-born conductor’s ad hoc all-star super-band, rode into a full-to-bursting Royal Albert Hall once again last night with an all-American Proms programme that promised not just crowd-pleasing Stateside favourites (Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in its centenary year, Barber’s Adagio for Strings) but the towering Yosemite peak of John Adams’s massive symphony-in-all-but name, Harmonielehre. There were a couple of moments, especially in a sometimes routine rendering of Copland’s Billy the Kid, when their famously blazing Read more ...