Reviews
Marina Vaizey
The movie musical: money making or true art – or both? This was a programme to sing along to, in the company of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. In this second instalment of Neil Brand’s brilliant three-part history, he looked at the genre from the 1940s to the 1960s, from the USA to the UK, as well as voyaging to India and China and dropping in a salut to France.These two decades are labelled the “Second Golden Age”. We bounced straight in with images of New York accompanied by Leonard Bernstein’s euphoric post-war “New York New York”, emblematic of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a ruthless logic to the scheduling of The Long Song (BBC One). Broadcast over three consecutive nights, this fleet-footed adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel set during the era of abolition in 19th-century Jamaica swiftly gathered momentum and proceeded at pace towards (praise be) a charming denouement. But why Christmas?In fact the season to be jolly came up twice. In the opening episode there were the Christmas riots of 1831 in which rebellious slaves were subjected to a horrific pogrom. And then in the final episode, they greeted their freedom as the opportunity to down tools and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A tremendous year for American theatre on the London stage is resoundingly capped by Sweat, the Lynn Nottage Pulitzer prize-winner that folds the personal and the political into a collective requiem for a riven country. But the wounding if sometimes overexplicit writing wouldn't amount to what is yet another feather in the Donmar's 2018 cap without an astonishing directing debut at that address of Lynette Linton, who is shortly to take the reins at the Bush. Between Lynton, designer Frankie Bradshaw, and the ensemble cast of one's dreams, Nottage's portrait of a land in divisive freefall Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The story of Henri Charrière’s gruelling ordeal as a prisoner in French Guiana and eventual escape was a bestseller on everyone’s bookshelf in the 1970s. It didn’t take long for it to become a Hollywood drama, which showcased the gigawatt talents of Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. McQueen ruggedly embodied the titular convict, named after the butterfly tattoo on his chest, and Hoffman reprised a version of the shuffling weirdo he played in Midnight Cowboy. The film still has a rightful place in the pantheon of escape movies including titles as disparate as The Shawshank Redemption, Down by Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
2018. Another year when strong presences who have shaped and defined the music for decades, and whom one had fondly imagined might be around for ever, are gone from our midst. Unique vocalists Aretha Franklin and Nancy Wilson have passed away. And trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Tomasz Stańko. And a true original of the piano, Cecil Taylor. In France, the jazz scene was shocked to its core in February by a death which came completely from the blue. One of the greats of jazz violin, an energetic and pivotal figure in French jazz, Didier Lockwood, was suddenly gone at the age of Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Joe Hill-Gibbins’ uncompromising production of The Tragedy of Richard II hurtles through Shakespeare’s original text, stripping and flaying it so it is revealed in a new shuddering light. Narcissistic, petulant and indecisive, Simon Russell Beale’s Richard stumbles towards his downfall in a prison cell in which it is never clear what’s a figment of his paranoid imagination and what’s reality. Under Rupert Goold’s artistic directorship the Almeida has become renowned as a theatre where classical texts are given the equivalent of ECT, and Hill-Gibbins quickly sets out his intentions Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's perhaps unfair to review a film through the prism of one that predates it by more than half a century, but even fans of Mary Poppins Returns (and I am one of them) can't help doing so. Mary Poppins (1964) has become such an established part of childhood film-viewing – whatever your age – that comparisons and reference to Disney's Julie Andrews vehicle seep into one's consciousness without bidding.But let me try to talk about Mary Poppins Returns (directed and produced by Rob Marshall) in its own right. The action takes place in Depression-era London, when the original books by PL Travers Read more ...
Veronica Lee
With the politics of hate alive and well both sides of the Atlantic, this seems a good time to revive Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's 2003 musical, which is set in Civil Rights-era Louisiana. This production was first seen at Chichester Minerva Theatre last year and transfers to the West End via a run at Hampstead Theatre and has a stand-out central performance by Sharon D Clarke.Inspired in part by Kushner’s own Southern Jewish childhood, Caroline, or Change is almost entirely sung-through and Clarke (pictured below) is the titular black maid who is paid a pittance by the Gellman family to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If you’re looking for a Christmas with more pagan edge than saccharine cheer, where the wolves are howling and the mythological characters are steeped in the terror and mystery of winter’s long dark nights, then make haste to Wilton’s Music Hall. For the second year running, this adaptation of John Masefield’s chillingly beautiful 1935 novel – in which a child with a magical box is caught up in an elemental battle between good and evil – takes audiences on a darkly thrilling quest to save Christmas.From the moment you walk into the auditorium of Wilton’s Music Hall, where the gloaming is Read more ...
David Nice
Like the fountains that sprang up in the desert during the Holy Family's flight into Egypt - according to a charming episode in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew - Berlioz's new-found creativity in the 1850s flowed from a couple of bars of organ music he inscribed in a friend's visitors book. That became the Shepherd's Farewell to Mary, Joseph and Jesus as they depart from Bethlehem, loveliest of all Christmas carols; then Berlioz added two movements around it, and later two low-level dramatic sequences either side of "The Flight into Egypt" (the scene pictured below by Carpaccio). The triptych - Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s about to begin. The final performance on the final night – and only UK date – of the European Apocalypse package tour featuring four extreme metal bands. The 1,700 capacity Roundhouse is sold out. Touts outside are scrabbling for tickets. A curtain covers the stagefront. A procession of images flicker across it; ancient art, demons, gods and hellish conflict. Then the screen goes black. In large white gothic letters, words in sequence: LONDON. PREPARE. TO. GET. DESTROYED. The curtain drops. The white-light silhouetted forms of German thrash juggernaut Kreator pounce in at a velocity Read more ...
Mahan Esfahani / Richard Goode, Wigmore Hall review - clarity and contrast from two keyboard masters
Sebastian Scotney
Two successive nights, two contrasted solo keyboard recitals at the Wigmore Hall: not great for the knees but marvellous for the soul. On Saturday the Tehran-born, US-raised harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani continued a mammoth project: he has been invited by the Wigmore Hall to present more or less the entirety of Bach’s works for harpsichord over five seasons. The series started with the Goldberg Variations, and in the current season, he is working his way through all of the Partitas, with further instalments to come in March and July. It is a series which really brings to life Beethoven’s idea Read more ...