Reviews
David Nice
“There will be more incense,” promised Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati of the company’s annual visit to the Proms. He was talking to my Opera Zoom class between the final rehearsal and first performance of Poulenc’s great masterpiece about the martyrdom of Carmelite nuns during the French revolution, as directed by Barrie Kosky with unsparing horror and humanity. And now here was the operatic company of the year taking its final bow after a sellout run in Sussex.Ticciati was right: during earlier scenes in the convent, the hallowed atmosphere in the Albert Hall was such that over Read more ...
David Kettle
Stuntman, Summerhall ★★★★★Masculinity and violence are hot subjects for theatrical examination – and dance theatre two-hander Stuntman from Scottish company Superfan is far from the only Fringe show that investigates them this year. What makes Stuntman stand out, though, is a particularly playful, even tender perspective on those forbiddingly thorny issues, and a joyfully light-touch appraisal of their crucial impact on male identity and relationships.The show might begin with gleeful live-action re-enactments of shoot-em-up hyperviolence from the two swaggering performers, all Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ania Magliano, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★ When Ania Magliano made her Fringe debut last year, her show was rightly garlanded with four- and five-star reviews. She sounded like an original voice on the comedy scene and this year her show, I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This, sold out its entire run before the festival opened.An hour that is ostensibly about the comic’s worst haircut doesn’t sound enthralling, but of course it works both as metaphor about overcoming adversity and a structure for the comedy as Magliano talks about her recovery from a sexual assault.She uses the hairdresser’s lack of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Matthew Bourne regularly revamps the first version of a new piece so that by the second go-round it really zings. For the return of his 2019 Romeo + Juliet, though, very little has changed, yet it feels refreshed.Dramaturgically, it’s still a bit unwieldy. Bourne’s lovers are inmates at the Verona Institute, some kind of correctional facility in “the not too distant future”. Unlike the other incarcerated waifs, Romeo has well-heeled parents (his father is Senator Montague), and they have placed him there, we don’t know exactly why. They can also extricate him at will, we discover, when Bourne Read more ...
Simon Thompson
And we’re off! This concert marked the beginning not just of the 2023 Edinburgh International Festival but, perhaps more importantly, of Nicola Benedetti’s tenure in charge as the EIF’s Director. She came onstage for a chat before a note of music was played. Part of her mission as director appears to be to make the arts more accessible, and if her introductory chat wasn’t much more than a gentle hello then it still did the job. Any aim to demystify classical music has to be welcomed.That brief seems to have been passed on to violinist Stefan Jackiw, the artist around whom this programme Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ed Byrne Assembly Rooms ★★★★★ Ed Byrne has frequently referenced his loved ones in previous shows but this new hour is one he would never wanted to have written, as it was prompted by the death of his younger brother, Paul, last year. Its title, Tragedy Plus Time, is taken from an aphorism attributed to Mark Twain about the definition of humour.But this is no misery memoir, far from it – Byrne is too talented a comic for that, and it’s a gag-filled hour, albeit one that deals with death and its impact. Byrne also poses some questions about the nature of sibling love and rivalry, and the Read more ...
James Saynor
The vogue for star ratings fixed to film reviews arrived after the heyday of exploitation movies, which is perhaps just as well because the whole point of such films is that they’re good and terrible at the same time.Like Schrödinger’s cat in quantum physics – dead and alive simultaneously – they’re both five stars and one star. Or at least that’s how many cineastes saw slasher movies in the romping, anything-goes era of postmodernism 40 years ago, when Quentin Tarantino was gleefully slinging work by Dario Argento or Abel Ferrara across a video-store counter somewhere.From that perspective, Read more ...
David Nice
Programming works from the same decade – in this case the 1940s – can reveal fascinating contrasts: what an impressive gulf, for instance, between two masterpieces by Hindemith and Strauss in this first half, and what sensitivity to very different styles from the NYOGB under Carlos Miguel Prieto. Be careful what you choose as the big symphony, though. I’d always had my doubts about Copland’s Third, and though it couldn’t have been more compellingly lit and shaped, it paled by comparison.Let’s get the elephant in the Royal Albert Hall room out first, for in every other respect, encores rich in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This Seth Rogen-produced, Family Guy writers-co-scripted gross-out comedy with four Chinese-American women fully lives up and down to its description. With Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim as debuting director, it’s also another demographically pioneering work.Audrey (Ashley Park), a Chinese girl adopted by white American parents, bonds with Lolo (Sherry Cola) as the only Asian-American kids in their Seattle neighbourhood, growing into odd couple adult best friends, Audrey’s promising corporate law career contrasting with Lolo’s struggling sex-positive art. Audrey’s business trip to seal Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Düsseldorf’s most famous band is Kraftwerk. Neu!, La Düsseldorf, and, a little later, D.A.F also helped mark-out the west German city as the home of musical boundary pushers – folks doing their own thing. Fellow Düsseldorf residents Die Toten Hosen took a different musical tack, but were as individualistic as those lumped in with Krautrock or kosmiche music. And where there’s the known, there’s also the unknown.In this spirit, Klar!80 - Ein Kassettenlabel aus Düsseldorf 1980-1982 digs so deeply into Düsseldorf’s post-punk musical underbelly that the names assembled are mostly unfamiliar: Read more ...
Justine Elias
Big bitey sharks and prehistoric monsters have tantalised the imaginations of summer moviegoers for decades, from Jules Verne to Jaws. James Cameron’s Avatar 2: The Way of Water and the director’s recent scientific commentary on the OceanGate submersible disaster also serve to underline the public fascination with the dangerous deep.Alas, Meg 2: The Trench, based, like its predecessor, on Steve Alten’s hit novels about hungry megasharks, bellyflops and bores. Too bad, because leading man Jason Statham can be a most droll and reliable hero even when the movie around him becomes defiantly Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Yuja Wang and Klaus Mäkelä, two of the classical world’s biggest hitters, have recently united to make that even more powerful item, the “power couple”. But much as they are both photogenic and charismatic, their reputations are also based on musical excellence, as was on display at last night’s sizzling Prom.But far from wallowing in romantic excess, they gave a reading of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini that was refreshingly no-nonsense in its approach, nimble, mercurial and the opposite of self-indulgent.Wang’s playing had momentum from its very opening, which never sat back Read more ...