Reviews
Veronica Lee
Most people’s experience of the 120 or so Victorian asylums that littered the UK landscape for more than a century is, thankfully, oohing and aahing over the “sophisticated and sensitive” conversions they have become, providing “astonishing, unusual and stylish” apartments, as estate-agent-speak has it. Those fortunate enough to move into these beautiful new homes are doing so of their own accord, of course, but many of those held in their previous incarnations would have preferred to be anywhere else at all.This documentary, made by Chris Boulding for the BBC’s Open University strand, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Quasi, Bye Bye Blackbird (Domino) The "Bye Bye Blackbird" on offer here is not the jazz stalwart favoured by everyone from Peggy Lee to Miles Davis. It is, instead, a garage guitar-pop concoction from perennial underdog trio Quasi from Portland, Oregon, that prolific centre of American indie guitar raucousness. At the core of the band, ex-husband and wife Sam Coombes and Janet Weiss have always appeared happy, throughout eight albums, to veer into wilful lo-fi messiness whenever their natural aptitude for a tasty melodic song threatens to interfere. This time, though, they've blown it.The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where were you? For those of us too young to experience Kennedy’s assassination, which realistically is anyone under the age of 55, the Royal Wedding is the next event along the chain of history that simultaneously impinged on much of the globe’s consciousness. In July 1981, I was on a French course in Clermont Ferrand and the whole group watched Lady Di get Prince Charles’s names in the wrong order on a TV in class. There must have been French commentary. Were you anywhere in particular?For the inhabitants of a Welsh pit village in Abi Morgan’s drama Royal Wedding, the nuptials up in London Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You can take the girl out of the barracks but you can’t take the barracks out of the girl would be one way to sum up Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (Daughter of the Regiment), which I can’t conceive could have a more ribtickling production, more brilliantly sung, than the delight that opened last night at Covent Garden. Kill, as they say, to get a ticket. It has Natalie Dessay, Juan Diego Flórez, Ann Murray and Dawn French, and in a starring supporting role comes one of the wittiest set of translating surtitles I’ve ever come across. “It’s raining soldiers,” complains the butler as the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most exciting part of the screening of this absurd new blockbuster was an appearance by producer Jerry Bruckheimer for a pre-show pep talk. You may be familiar with his CV - Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, all the CSIs, Pirates of the Caribbean. Only a little guy, but so was Attila the Hun. He raved dutifully to a theatre-full of British hacks about the flick’s marvellous mostly-English cast (a lot of it having been shot at Pinewood) and schmoozed with its beaming director, Mike “Four Weddings” Newell.I daresay Jerry (and indeed Pinewood Studios) hope that Prince of Persia will kick off Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Is it music or just a bit weird?" Robert Hollingworth, director of Baroque vocal specialists I Fagiolini, was posing the question of Gesualdo, the infamous oddball composer of the late 16th century - a sort of musical Caravaggio - whose capricious way with just about every aspect of composition (and social norms: he was a murderer) made him a poster boy for the 20th century. It's a question, however, that could quite easily apply to any great pioneer. The best music is always on the cusp of making no sense at all. And therefore it could also apply to much of the Lufthansa Baroque Festival Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street is such a quintessential rock epic that it ought to be added to the list of things they throw in for free on Desert Island Discs. Defying the old adage that all double albums would be vastly improved by being boiled down into a single one, Exile is such an astounding feast of blues, gospel, boogie, country and flat-out rock that it feels as if it ought to have been a triple album instead. And guess what - now it is, thanks to Polydor's new reissue which arrives with an extra disc of Exile-related material mysteriously lifted from the vaults 38 years Read more ...
howard.male
“Just drop the wisecracks for one minute, will you!” snaps George Alan O'Dowd’s father, played with craggy authority by Francis Magee. And he has a point. The snide remarks and oh-so-gay repartee come so thick and fast in this BBC drama that it is hard to see writer Tony Basgallop’s screenplay as a realistic recreation of the world of Steve Strange, Marilyn, Culture Club drummer Jon Moss and our George. When this waspish crowd fire coruscating dialogue at one another it's as if they are channelling Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.We all know that our George is Read more ...
roslyn.sulcas
In the New York City Ballet’s grand tradition of ambitious festivals of new work, its current offering, Architecture of Dance, is a big, ambitious deal: seven new ballets; four of them to commissioned scores; five sporting sets by the famed architect Santiago Calatrava. Three of the works are by the men who are arguably the most exciting ballet-makers in the world right now: Alexei Ratmansky, Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon. In New York, the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer McGregor is the least-known of that trio - this is his first commission for an American company, and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people know Andy Hamilton from his frequent (and very droll) appearances on panel shows such as Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz on television and radio, but he is also a prolific writer. His writing credits could take up the whole of this review, but a brief CV includes Not the Nine O’Clock News, Drop the Dead Donkey, Old Harry’s Game and, most recently, the equally excellent Outnumbered on BBC One, which he co-writes with Guy Jenkin. But now, with Hat of Doom, he is going back to where he started in comedy and doing a stand-up tour.He gets the measure of his audience straight Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"We need to inform you officially. Mr Walter, you died yesterday. I’m sorry for your loss." It comes as no great surprise to learn that Michel van der Aa’s opera After Life is based on a Japanese film. The Borgesian hyper-real scenario, the no-place location and meditative pacing all point, or rather - rejecting anything so crass - bow respectfully to their original source. Adopting the premise of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film of the same name, Van der Aa has created a multimedia opera that both asks and answers the question: if you could take only one memory with you after death, what would it be Read more ...
fisun.guner
Does form always have to follow function? Is ornamentation really such a heinous crime? Or is Modernism itself the enemy of the people? The second part of this excellent five-part series – fab archive footage, great interviews with designers young enough to no longer be beholden to the Modernist creed – focused on the founding of the Bauhaus and the Modernist aesthetic. And after juggling a lot of questions, it gently guided us towards more or less the same position as Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, though in a far more respectful, design-conscious way: Modernism worked in theory but Read more ...