Reviews
Tom Birchenough
There’s an exuberant comedy from the start in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, which comes to London after an initial Covid-truncated Off Broadway run which brought her a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Roy Alexander Weise’s production puts in all the energy it can find and then more, doing its best to balance that comedy with the more serious themes, such as family responsibility, and a man’s role in the world, with which it is interspersed.It’s a balance that the production does not finally quite achieve, however, with an extended first half dominated by the kitchen banter of four Memphis friends, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Fans of American playwright Annie Baker’s work know what they are likely to get in her film debut as a writer-director: slow-paced interactions between characters thrown together in a confined space – a workplace, a B&B, a clinic – where long bouts of silence are not uncommon and little happens but everything important somehow gets said. Janet Planet is classic Baker in this respect. In some scenes, the birds and crickets make more noise than the humans, and whirring fans get solos. There’s also music, a rarity in a Baker stage production, here mostly coming from car radios or home Read more ...
David Nice
Jerry Herman is the king of pep. Way too much of it in the first 20 minutes of the recent revue Jerry’s Girls had me screaming for a breather, but here the opening cavalcade, gorgeous overture included, intoxicates thanks to Dominic Cooke‘s razor-sharp direction. And the two torch songs, "Before the Parade Passes By" and the title number, begin in pathos before Imelda Staunton flashes her high-heeled party shoes.Consider the context: a widow of advancing years wants a second chance to be at the centre of things in 1890s New York. Marriage-broker Dolly Gallagher Levi isn’t your usual leading Read more ...
Issy Brooks-Ward
How do you give voice to a history that is intimate to your own in one sense, whilst being the story of others whom you never knew? This is a question that Ellen McWilliams, in her highly moving and humorous memoir, takes not only seriously but as the stylistic basis of her work. An early rhetorical question she asks haunts the text: ‘who am I to speak?’ The consequences of asking this are twofold and, I think, important. It conjures the anxiety of forcing the tragic narratives owned by others to conform to the pattern of a separate subjective language. But it also carries with it the weight Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Baker's Wife closed on the way to Broadway in 1976, since which time Stephen Schwartz's stubbornly resistent if sweetly scored musical has been revived and reworked all over the map, not least by Gordon Greenberg. The American director has tackled the show three times previously on his native soil and is now marking his retour to the Gallic gathering it puts before us at the venue where he previously directed Barnum. I'd love to report that the show this time flies, much like the meadowlark in the ravishing first-act solo number from the title character that remains the takeaway song Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As Janis Pugh’s semi-autobiographical Chuck Chuck Baby draws to a close, the camera fondly plays around the smiling faces of some of its voiceless female characters – careworn middle-aged workers in a Welsh chicken processing factory. They're cheered by finally seeing something good happen to one of their number. It’s the romantic musical drama’s most loving visual aside – the poultry packers’ ingrained pain and disappointment momentarily forgotten.The woman in question is Helen (Louise Brealey), at the start a near-broken drudge, pushing 40 and consigned to domestic misery, her only Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Could “Cav and Pag” give way to “Sue and Pag”? As a double-bill partner for Leoncavallo’s backstage shocker Pagliacci, Opera Holland Park have scheduled not the standard Cavalleria Rusticana but an entirely different one-act work. Premiered in Munich in 1909, Wolf-Ferrari’s Il Segreto di Susanna plays droll, even farcical, variations on the same theme of male jealousy as newlywed Count Gil suspects his bride Countess Susanna of having an affair. But the whiff of tobacco she brings into the lavish Art Deco apartment turns out to derive from her own cigarettes. The reconciled couple Read more ...
India Lewis
Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History is personal: a novel, that is, strangely inflected by autobiography, a history that is simultaneously expansive and intimate. This fact is acknowledged in the book’s afterword; but it can also be found in various grammatical and narrative slippages: the shift from third- to first-person when we meet granddaughter Chloe, for instance, who feels like a cypher for Messud; or else, a bittersweet scene in which Chloe finds her grandfather’s reams of (mostly unpublished) articles, his vast family history, or her aunt’s diary – all of which ring with Read more ...
David Nice
"The world meets in Pärnu", slogan for the 14th festival in Estonia's summer seaside capital, has held good ever since Paavo Järvi gathered native musicians and key players from the international teams he inspires to form what's now the Estonian Festival Orchestra. Buzz about the youngsters formerly serving just the conductors’ course is new; 2024's Järvi Academy Youth Symphony Orchestra embraces 30 countries.So it was that the youngest member, 11-year-old Armenian cellist Aren Toplaghaltsian, got to play his first Beethoven symphony under 87-year old Neeme Järvi, a living legend (young Aren Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jenna Coleman seems to pick her roles with care, whether it’s Queen Victoria, the girlfriend of mass murderer Charles Sobhraj in The Serpent, or “occult detective” Johanna Constantine in The Sandman, but her antennae may have been a bit awry when she climbed aboard this one.The Jetty is long on atmosphere and scenery but short on plausibility, and hammers away at its themes of abused women and abusive men so relentlessly that there’s not much room for anything else.The plot is kick-started by an arson attack at a lakeside boathouse, but screenwriter Cat Jones’s plan was to use this to ignite Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hannah Berner isn't a big name in stand-up (yet), but she's well known enough in the United States to have come to Netflix's attention. Her fame comes from TikTok and Instagram (where she has three million followers), her podcasts and formerly being a cast member of the Bravo reality series Summer House. We Ride at Dawn is her first, but I suspect not her last, Netflix special.In the stand-up hour filmed at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, the Brooklyn-born comic muses on a range of subjects – mostly sex, politics and relationships – but also riffs on Disney princes and the things that annoy her Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A stark end-title at the end of this collection of short films sums up the dire situation the UK is in: one in five people,14 million Britons, are now living in poverty. This shocking statistic is one the enterprising people of the Cardboard Citizens company, with The Big Issue as producer-hosts, are shining an unforgiving light on. They have created an impressive collection of nine simply shot but effective monologues about homelessness, poverty and inequity that will appear weekly on bigissue.com. The sting in the tail here is that this is work created by writers, directors and actors Read more ...