Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Directed by the fraternal duo Anthony and Joseph Russo, who have helmed several of the colossally successful Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, The Gray Man ought at least to be entertaining and stuffed with blockbusterish thrills.And it is, darting around the world as it tells its amusing but wildly implausible story of two battling hitmen. The Russo boys would have a panic attack if anyone accused it of being a work of exquisite sensibility and artistic finesse, but there’s no need to worry on that score.Nothing about The Gray Man (based on Mark Greaney’s novel) is original, and it may even Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Music plays a big part in the life of Dwight, an 11-year-old black lad growing up in early 80s Leeds. He doesn't fit in at school, bullied because he is "slow", and he doesn't fit in outside school, would-be friends losing patience with him.But he does fit in at home, loved unequivocally by a protective mother, somewhat enviously by a bickering sister, and rather reluctantly by a preoccupied father. Like the records he plays on the gramophone, his life is about to spin – and he'll have to hold on to the warmth of family love in a cold world.Zodwa Nyoni's new play for the Kiln Theatre packs Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Take an opera newbie along to Opera Holland Park’s double bill of rarities and they may have both their worst fears and their highest hopes confirmed. Outlandish plotting, overwrought melodrama and preposterous, supernatural stage business abounds. At the same time, some gorgeous music, memorable singing and dramatic coups make the whole fanciful spectacle soar and glow. Ecstasy and absurdity join clammy hands. Served together in this way, Delius’s Margot La Rouge and Puccini’s Le Villi offer a kind of small-plate tasting menu from the late 19th-century lyric stage (although the Delius dates Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
After gender-flipping the National’s Malvolio, the director Simon Godwin might have been expected to be equally bold with Much Ado About Nothing at the same address. A same-sex Beatrice and Benedick romance? Dogberry in bondage gear, zonked out on poppers? True, Godwin has been free with the text, cutting freely and turning Governor Leonato into a hotel owner with a wife instead of a brother, but this production is still unexpectedly trad. It’s set in Sicily in “an imagined past”, though looking a lot like Golden Age Hollywood, where Don Pedro and his officers are checking into the Hotel Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The spirit of Sir Richard Burton loomed large over the Royal Albert Hall last night – a man who wrote about everything from falconry to erotica and whose death-defying expeditions took him across the Middle East, Africa and the Americas. Between 1885 and 1888 he produced a definitive translation of A Thousand And One Nights that galvanised intellectual Europe, not least because its content – which was often as illicit as it was exotic – could only be accessed by private subscribers.Rimsky-Korsakov was arguably the first composer to produce a definitive response to this controversial text and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Drama is writing in thin air, its content instantly spirited away into unreliable memory, so if a play is to be revived a quarter century on from its first run, it has to say something substantial about the human condition. Patrick Marber's Closer does so because people are always balancing the need for love with the need for sex, dealing with the gnawing desire for someone just out of reach, wearily coping with the emotional baggage of lives lived badly.And here it is in a 25th anniversary revival at the Lyric Hammersmith directed by Clare Lizzimore: not bad for a play that opened Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This is the summer, in musical theatre terms at least, of the revival of the revival, with several recent remountings of iconic titles (South Pacific, now in London previews) getting a renewed lease on life, alongside the likes of My Fair Lady, Crazy for You, and Sister Act on hand in or near London to swell the ranks of the familiar yet further.So it's a delight to report that England's own Kerry Ellis – a onetime Eliza Doolittle as it happens – has taken over from Broadway powerhouse Sutton Foster in Kathleen Marshall's transplanted take on Anything Goes for an encore engagement Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Russia meets Iceland: not the most obvious of juxtapositions. But the connection between the four composers featured in Prom 8 is to be found in their filmic approaches: the two contemporary Icelanders are both better known as media composers than in the concert hall, while Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky’s sweeping styles have inspired film composers since there have been film composers. But while the Russians wear their hearts on their sleeves, the Icelandic composers’ pieces were inscrutable, detached and demanding of a different kind of listening.Jóhann Jóhannsson, who died at the age of 48 Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
How do you celebrate one of epic poetry’s richest female characters, a queen renowned across the Middle East and North Africa for being as politically powerful as she was magnetic? For Nahum Tate, the librettist for Dido and Aeneas, the curious answer is to push aside Dido’s achievements as a ruler and city builder and replace Virgil’s stirring metaphor for her plight with something, well, a little tamer.It’s no small part of the great achievement of Purcell’s score that it takes Tate’s frankly mediocre poetry and through harmonic and rhythmic innovation transforms the base metal of his words Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The ferocity of Tuesday's heat wasn’t reflected in the pleasantly air-conditioned Royal Albert Hall – the coolest I had felt all day – but was in the intense playing of the BBC Philharmonic, in a pair of knotty and urgent British symphonies.The programming had a neat simplicity: the fourth symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Tippett. It was also slightly thin – just over an hour of music which, even allowing for having to give way for a late-night Dido and Aeneas, could have squeezed in something else.Neither symphony is easy listening – and this, combined with the heat and travel chaos, meant Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Good Boss's Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem) is not short of belief in his talents as a leader. Not just good, he evidently thinks he is the best boss ever. We watch him on the prowl, exerting influence and power over his family business, micro-managing everything and everyone. His philosophy is that there's no task involving a staff member – or a member of their families – that's too petty or too personal for him be involved in, too. And it's his genius, of course, that ends up solving every problem. He justifies his actions because the buck stops with him: “Your problems become my Read more ...
Robert Beale
It’s an ill heatwave that brings nobody any good, and Buxton International Festival’s decision to move its highlight concert, by Manchester Camerata with Jess Gillam and the Brodsky Quartet as their guests, from the Buxton Octagon to St John’s Church meant not only that it was heard in probably the only coolish venue in town yesterday afternoon, but also that it benefitted from an acoustic that’s excellent for instrumental music.The Camerata is celebrating its 50th anniversary in different places this year, and while the personnel seen yesterday may not overlap entirely with the band we are Read more ...