Reviews
Kieron Tyler
What’s now been titled The 1959 Sessions represents an unreleased studio album completed by the Stan Tracey Trio on 5 and 8 June 1959 at Decca’s London studio at Broadhurst Gardens. If issued then, it would have been the swift follow-up to the trio’s debut album Little Klunk, recorded at the same studio on 22 and 26 May 1959.Little Klunk was made by Tracey (piano, vibes), Kenny Napper (bass) and Phil Seaman (drums). This release features those three on four tracks – Tracey originals – and Tracey and Napper plus Tony Crombie rather than Seaman on drums for the remaining four tracks: which are Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There has been no shortage of documentaries about king Beach Boy Brian Wilson, not to mention the 2014 bio-drama Love & Mercy, so the purpose of this new effort by director Brent Wilson (no relation) isn’t altogether clear. Certainly Wilson (the director) leaves no stone unturned in his mission to emphasise once again the ineffable genius of the former symphonist of surf, but surely nobody with an interest in pop history needs any reminding.As such eminent talking heads as Bruce Springsteen, Don Was and Elton John are wheeled out to testify to Brian’s brilliance, a sceptic might detect Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Neglected classics, whether books, plays or ballets, are usually neglected for a reason, and so it is with the three-act ballet Raymonda. A hit in 1898 for the Imperial ballet in St Petersburg but unperformed in this country since the 1960s, its ineffectual heroine, fuzzy sense of geography and offensively silly plot have made it impossible to stage in full – at least in Britain. In Russia, whose ballet culture has a higher tolerance of such things, the work remains central to the repertoire, complete with foiled kidnap by a muslim villain but minus more than half the original choreography, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Guillermo del Toro has described Nightmare Alley as “a straight, really dark story”, lacking the supernatural elements in his previous films such as Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. Nonetheless, Nightmare Alley still feels like a spectral visitation from a weird and menacing dimension.Based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham (previously filmed in 1947 starring Tyrone Power), it’s the story of ambitious carnival worker Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), who we see in the opening sequence setting fire to what we will learn was his own home in the Midwest. At first he’s a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
One of the many theatrical casualties of Omicron in December was the official UK opening of Moulin Rouge!, the stage version of Baz Luhrmann’s indelible 2001 film that has already racked up 10 Tony Awards for its 2019 Broadway production (albeit in a depleted season). Thankfully, the show is now back at full strength, and, if anything, its explosion of song, colour and eye-popping spectacle is even more welcome during these grey January days.Once again, we’re entering the fantasy that is the Moulin Rouge nightclub in fin de siècle Paris, where the show’s star, courtesan Satine (Liisi Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Memory Box is that rare thing, a glimpse into a lost world from its traumatised inhabitants. Made by the Lebanese artist-filmmakers, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (a husband and wife team), it’s an intergenerational drama split between Beirut during the Eighties (the height of the Lebanese Civil War) and present day Canada. During the war, over a million people fled the country, including Hadjithomas’s best friend, a teenage girl who moved to Paris.They kept in close touch sending each other notebooks filled with photos, drawings, magazine cuttings and recorded voice messages on Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2019, Russell Howard was all set to celebrate his 20th year in comedy by going on a world tour. Covid put paid to that, so it was with some genuine celebration that he was able to return to the stage with Lubricant, his second Netflix special, recorded at the Eventim Apollo in late 2021.He was able to use some of the material of that anniversary show, Respite – about finding the pleasure rather than the pain in life and describing a world spinning out of control. Little did he know. In Lubricant he has skilfully updated Respite – written “when Corona was a beer and Harry was a prince” – Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There's a lot of True Crime stuff about, so it's hardly a surprise to see Stephen Dolginoff's 2003 off-Broadway musical back on the London stage, a West End venue for the Hope Theatre's award-winning 2019 production. Whether one needs to see a pair of charismatic child killers given a platform to explain their crimes while the victim, Bobby Franks, is merely a name, his face as absent as it was after the acid was poured all over it – well, you can make your own judgement about that.A serious point maybe, but this is a serious show, the intensity of the two men's relationship enhanced by the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“It mustn’t be a surface thing. You have to put in the work,” Janet Baker once said. Sandrine Piau’s Wigmore recital of German song followed by French song was the perfect demonstration of that credo in action.Whereas Piau described the repertoire, almost nonchalantly before performing their encore – Debussy’s “Beau Soir” – as a “new programme from David Kadouch”, there was no disguising the level of careful preparation and forethought which both singer and pianist had put into every nuance. The poetry and the music could be savoured and enjoyed completely; the results were overwhelmingly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The name of Neville Chamberlain and the term “appeasement” have become indelibly linked, thanks to his efforts to accommodate Adolf Hitler’s bellicose ambitions in the run-up to what became World War Two.This film version of Robert Harris’s novel Munich seeks to draw a more nuanced portrait of the British Prime Minister, putting the case that the agreement Chamberlain signed with Hitler in Munich in September 1938 delayed the outbreak of war long enough to allow Britain and her allies to prepare themselves for hostilities and eventually defeat Germany.It’s a thesis which might be deemed to Read more ...
Ian Julier
Having conducted two Discovery programmes with the LSO after being a finalist in the 2016 Donatella Flick competition, London-born Kerem Hasan went on to win the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award in 2017. Operatic entrées arrived swiftly with his appointment as Associate Conductor at WNO, and a notable Glyndebourne debut with their recent touring revival of The Rake’s Progress followed by Rossini’s L'italiana in Algeri in Innsbruck, where he has been Chief Conductor of the Tirol SO since 2019. March this year sees him at ENO for Così, so no surprise that this Bournemouth Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There was a time when UK pantomime was heavily populated by Australian soap stars; rather late in the day Jason Donovan – formerly known as Scott from Neighbours – makes his panto debut, as Count (careful how you pronounce that, Jason) Ramsay of Erinsborough.Playing against type in a baddie role, he acquits himself well in this thoroughly entertaining spectacle with several nods to vaudeville (including circus acts in the line-up), but his fans might wish he played a more substantial part in proceedings.It’s well into the second act before he has much to do. In a paper-thin plot, Donovan's Read more ...