Reviews
Matt Wolf
Who says you can't go home again? As proof that you can, and to giddy and gorgeous results, along comes the current West End revival of Crazy for You, which reunites Broadway name Susan Stroman with the Gershwin-inspired title that launched this singular talent on her career ascent more than 30 years ago. I saw that production in New York, as I saw its London original with Ruthie Henshall and also the (unrelated, in creative terms) Regent's Park revival that followed, and can report without hesitation that this current iteration is very much the best of them all. Back at the show's Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Can things change, or must they always stay the same? The latest history play by Jack Thorne, a man of the moment whose Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is still in the West End and whose National Theatre hit The Motive and the Cue will transfer in December, revisits the early history of the BBC to show how current tensions between public service impartiality and political expediency have a long backstory.With a title that evokes the past, When Winston Went to War with the Wireless is a lively play of ideas that sits comfortably in the Donmar Warehouse’s intimate surroundings. But is this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This fourth season of Prime’s reworking of Tom Clancy’s fictional CIA man is supposedly the last (to avoid any confusion they’ve dubbed it The Final Mission). It maintains its tradition of deluxe production values, globe-hopping locations and the kind of labyrinthine plotting liable to prompt frequent recourse to the rewind button.Clancy’s novels have fuelled a string of movies starring Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin and Chris Pine, but the TV show’s creators Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland (veterans of such small-screen hits as Lost, Fringe and Prison Break) wanted to create a Ryan- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The revolution in the title of AJ Yi’s new play at the Bush is the one activists hoped to set in motion in Hong Kong in 2019, when China’s stewardship was increasingly restricting their civil liberties. The music on the playlist serves as an evocative backing track for the former colony’s 21st century makeover by China, a Western-influenced alternative. It’s also a call to arms. At least, that’s what Chloe Chang (Mae Mae Macleod) is hoping when she suggests creating a playlist to the young economics student, Jonathan Lau (Liam Lau-Fernandez), whom she meets on the last night of her visit Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There are some songs, and singers, that make your heart swell. One of them, for me, is Ani DiFranco’s 1998 single “Little Plastic Castle”, so I was delighted to see that Isley Lynn, in the playtext of her new show at the Orange Tree Theatre, has chosen, as an epigraph, a line from DiFranco’s song “Promised Land”: “And they say that the truth will set you free/ But then so will a lie.”I have to say that this captures, in all its suggestive complexity, the essence of this superb play about love, desire, deceit and commitment. The plot is classic: 27-year-old Annie is engaged to Bel, who’s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Smetana’s enchanting bitter-sweet comedy is probably on the danger-list for cancellation by the modern guardians of our moral sanctity. The plot hinges, like Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, on the cash-sale of the hero’s bride (in Hardy, the wife and daughter): not nice, and surely a risky hint to any young men in the audience teetering on the brink.And it has an anti-hero in the person of a youth with a stammer, who gets laughed at and ends up as a circus bear. The fact that the proposed sale is a trick to enable a genuine love match is the sort of detail that passes unnoticed in the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lucky Will Young: the production of the Simon Stephens monologue Song from Far Away that he is delivering at the Hampstead Theatre is directed by Kirk Jameson, not Ivo van Hove.The modish Dutch director of the initial UK staging, seen at the Young Vic in 2015, stripped his actor naked for much of the performance. Young, though, is allowed a loose white shirt and black trousers throughout. Van Hove’s literal laying bare of Willem was presumably a visual aid to what he thought the monologue was setting out to do. Willem is a hollow man: a determinedly private individual, a hedgie and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“There's a richness and a true depth here that places Jeopardy alongside (U2’s debut album) Boy as early Eighties tonics for ailing mainstream-rock. The Sound are on to a winner. There isn't one track here that isn't thoroughly compulsive. Overall it's a vastly impressive sound, with as much energy as I've heard on any record all year…the result is a form of sheer power-rock that doesn't make you blush or grimace.”In November 1980, Sounds’ Dave McCullough was enthusiastic about The Sound’s first album Jeopardy. But he had some reservations about whether they could cut through to become more Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) revived Thirties adventure serials’ simple thrills, a George Lucas notion adrenalised by Spielberg. Its hero Indy Jones wasn’t built for depth or pathos, and the struggle to find reasons for his return notoriously sank Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and left this final chapter in production purgatory till Harrison Ford was 79.Ford wanted this sequel, disagreeing with Spielberg on its premise, and driving it to completion when the director gave up. Indy’s humanity wholly resides in his lopsided, ironic grins at peril, rugged but Read more ...
David Nice
Not a good start. The tenor (Brian Jagde) walks downstage and sings loudly, if securely, to the audience: hardly a characterisation of an idealistic young Infante meditating on love. The next voice, the Page’s, is barely heard (Ella Taylor gets better). Then we have The Presence: Lise Davidsen, who you know is Elisabeth de Valois in the only carefree mode she’s to experience throughout the opera.Davidsen holds this otherwise rather tired, if well sung and scrupulously conducted, revival of Nicholas Hytner’s respectable production together. Yes, nearly all the figures in Verdi’s adaptation of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If you are going to see A Strange Loop, the new American musical trailing a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize that has arrived at the Barbican, here’s a checklist of topics to make sure you are on top of first: intersectionality, Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, gospel plays, James Baldwin, the Chitlin’ Circuit, bell hooks, the back catalogue of Tyler Perry. Especially Tyler Perry.Perry is the Black American actor who has become a billionaire through film comedies featuring him as Madea, aka a middle-aged Black housewife called Mabel Simmons, and the rest of her family. He is the anti-Christ to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Amy Schumer opens Emergency Contact, her latest Netflix Special, by asking a young woman in the front row how old she is. When the answer comes back as “27”, the New York comic has found the perfect segue into material about being 42 and feeling her age.It’s anything but quotidian though as Schumer is a wry – and often very sharp – observer of the human condition. Indeed her material about actor Alec Baldwin and his “not-Spanish Spanish” wife, Hilaria (christened Hilary) is deliciously pointed in reflecting on identity and self-awareness, or lack of it.Most of the show – derived Read more ...