Reviews
Ismene Brown
Lush, romantic storyballets are as scarce as hens' teeth these days, despite the longing of much of the ballet audience to see them. Not because they're too elementary for today's dancemakers, I'd guess, but because to make one with lively dancing characters (male, female, young, old, good, bad, rich, poor), with a flowing story, lashings of set opportunities and an atmospheric score, takes multiple theatre skills few choreographers now develop. David Bintley's Cyrano is one of these rare birds, a truly skilled family ballet with all of the above.His treatment of Edmond Rostand's nostalgic Read more ...
David Nice
Bryn Terfel is a good guy. I know; he never forgets a face, and I’ve seen him making the tea for the entire team at a recording session – no one-off, they assured me. Yet the nature of the bass-baritone beast is given over to more villains than noble souls. The "bad boys" of opera and musical theatre are grist to Terfel’s satanic mill in his latest CD-linked tour. Although inevitably given the demands of live performance there’s less than meets the ear on the disc, Bryn as dark god in concert gives far more than those recent short-shrifting divas Fleming and Gheorghiu.What a relief, too, that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The stage of the Barbican is alive with black dudes in wheelchairs going bonkers. It's an extraordinary spectacle. To rocketing afro-funk, backed by a drum-kit of boxes and bells, Staff Benda Bilili's frontmen are rolling their chairs back and forth. Two of them face each other and perform loosely synchronized hand dances, another wearing an ecstatic grin clambers out of his wheelchair.Despite having legs shrivelled by polio to almost nothing, he scuttles round the stage, his arms agile, his movements a surreal breakdance. The audience claps wildly, pockets of dancing breaking out at the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I took advantage of critics’ privileges to see parts of two shows last night - as the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet are sister companies, they shouldn’t quarrel too much, and this way there turned out to be a most revealing side-effect. By missing a dud work on the BRB triple bill, and by seeing the first act of a potentially exciting debut in a major MacMillan work, certainly a better evening resulted - but also by chance a yardstick comparison that we rarely get any more.Seen after an act of MacMillan's 30-year-old Mayerling (for which I skipped Stanton Welch's meagre and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The famously tempestuous Romanian soprano is, we learn, living a separate life from her husband Roberto Alagna. If Opera's Most Romantic Couple is no more, will Brand Angela be terminally damaged? Surely a showcase performance in the South Bank's International Voices season would be just the thing to rally the faithful and reaffirm Ms Gheorghiu's spectacular star quality, but I must admit that by the time we reached the interval, I was beset with gnawing doubt.The performance had begun with a bright canter through Leonard Bernstein's Candide overture, with the Philharmonia Orchestra Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Reginald D Hunter wants us to know from the off that he will be using the “n” word in his show. A lot. Well, there’s a clue in the show’s title, The Only Apple in the Garden of Eden and Niggas, but that’s rather misleading; it’s less a description and more an in-joke from the time an earlier show’s posters (which also included it) were banned on the London Underground. So now he puts a rude word in the title of most of his shows and it pretty much indicates the Southerner’s style: punchy exposition tempered by knowing irony.Hunter first came to the UK study at Rada and the actorly training Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The premise of Collision (as well as its title) is unmistakably similar to that of Paul Haggis's movie Crash, in which a road accident provides the linking point for a cluster of disparate personal stories. However, instead of the boulevards of Los Angeles, Collision exploits the less often remarked upon mystique of the A12, which links east London to Great Yarmouth. In 2007, the A12 was adjudged "Britain's worst road" in a survey by Cornhill lnsurance, so Collision's creator and writer Anthony Horowitz has picked an appropriate location for his fateful multi-vehicle pile-up.
The strands of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michael Caine squares off against some of south London's hardiest hoodies in Harry Brown, a UK variant on the once-iconic Death Wish franchise that proves Sir Michael has plenty of life left in him still. Caine bestrides the film like someone who long ago marked out his terrain: no wonder the dope-fuelled no-hopers in his midst soon give way.The same admiration is unlikely to be afforded a movie - the first feature from one-time commercials and ad whiz Daniel Barber - that often plays like a Daily Mail wet dream about life in thug-filled England today. (Think of it as a cinematic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Michael Tilson Thomas’s association with the London Symphony Orchestra runs deep - he was its principal conductor for eight years, and for his latest return to his old band last night the American programmed works that, while they had a Viennese theme, also seemed vividly designed to show off the jewels of this great orchestra, its wonderful wind players. How the clarinettists, oboists, flautists, horn-players and trumpeters must have delighted to see what they were to play: Schubert’s Donizetti-like Rosamunde, with its haunting woodwind songs, Mahler’s richly picturesque song cycle Des Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
So many 19th-century opera plots park themselves on fertile historical ground, amid all the colour, character and juice you could ever want, and then spend three hours picking at some anaemic daisies at the edges. It was a worry last night as I watched Donizetti’s Maria di Rohan in concert at the Royal Festival Hall. By sidestepping the heavyweight power players of Louis XIII’s reign, the eminently operatic figures of Cardinal Richelieu (endlessly alluded to) and Marie de Medici, weren’t we also sidestepping the juice? Thankfully, not. But we did have to wait until the second half for it to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are horrors in the world so vile that few of us want to think about them. None more so than such cases as Josef Fritzl - or Jaycee Lee Dugard, or Arcedio Alvarez, or Raymond Gouardo, or Wolfgang Priklopil, or Marc Dutroux... but you get the picture. Cases where men abduct girls and turn them into sex slaves and father multiple children by them, often incestuously, hiding them in garages, basements, behind walls, sometimes for decades undiscovered, sometimes murdering them. Mostly you read that it happened, you shudder, and try not to think more about it. Impossible if you go to ENO’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There’s always a danger that when one raves about a play at the Edinburgh Fringe, seeing it a year later in another theatre and with a slightly different staging can be a disappointment. But that’s not the case with Architecting, a devised piece by New York-based ensemble the TEAM in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland. I still think it’s overlong and there’s too much going on in a complicated melding of several story strands in different time frames, but again it thrills as a committed, energetic piece of intelligent theatre.The TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Read more ...