Reviews
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t turn to Jimmy McGovern for a drawing-room comedy, but there’s no doubting his gift for seizing big issues and turning into them raw, bleeding chunks of drama. You’re either for him or against him, but if you’re against him he’d love to grab you by the throat and shake you into seeing it his way.In Care, McGovern (with co-writer Gillian Juckes, whose first-hand experiences inspired the story) took aim at the way the NHS and social services treat the elderly and the incapacitated. The set-up was simple but devastating. Mary (Alison Steadman) had been taking her two granddaughters Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Amid the cacophony and incivility that characterises so much of our lives today, an evening of calm and beauty with Katie Melua and the Gori Women’s Choir was just the ticket. The venue, Methodist Central Hall, is not the most obvious place for such a concert. Built to mark the centenary of John Wesley’s death, it welcomed the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, and Gandhi, Churchill and Martin Luther King have all spoken from its stage.The acoustics are excellent and Melua and her four-piece band – Tim Harries on electric and upright bass, Mark Edwards on keyboards, Nicky Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The London Philharmonic’s year-long Stravinsky festival, Changing Faces, concluded here in spectacular style, with a tribute to “The Swingling Sixties”. Vladimir Jurowski, the soon to be leaving – and soon to be much-missed, Principal Conductor of the LPO, devised an adventurous and innovative programme, pairing Stravinsky’s late masterpiece Threni with the contemporaneous Sinfonia of Berio. Aesthetically, these pieces were from different worlds, yet each in its way is suffused with the Sixties zeitgeist. Add to this superlative performances, and the result was a satisfying conclusion to one Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Susie McKenna and Steven Edis have been creating pantos for Hackney Empire for 20 years, and over that time its seasonal offering has become the theatre's signature event. To add to the anniversary celebrations, Clive Rowe, who first donned false bosoms as the Dame in 1998, has, after a break, returned to play Widow Twankey in Aladdin, while Tameka Empson (from EastEnders) is also back, as the Empress of Ha-Ka-Ney. Happy times.McKenna, who also directs, has taken a few liberties with the story (but as the programme notes point out, so too have many folklorists and storytellers down the years Read more ...
Jo Southerd
What makes a great Christmas song? There’s an alchemy to finding the winning combination of whimsy and humour, juxtaposed with a healthy slice of Christmas angst. This formula has led us to spin the same handful of pop bangers that endure down the decades, soundtracking generation after generation of tinsel and mince pies.This Christmas Day makes no attempt to pen an original hit, it’s simply a covers album of all the classic festive tunes. "Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town", "Man With The Bag", "Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree" – are all given the Jessie J treatment with vocal acrobatics Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps belatedly prompted by the release of Barbra Streisand’s new album Walls, the worst-selling disc in her 55 years with Columbia Records, this documentary was an uncritical celebration of Babs’s brilliant career from her first stage appearances in the late Fifties to the joys of Hello, Dolly!, The Way We Were and Yentl. The somewhat arbitrary cut-off date of 1984 meant that we were even able to enjoy a nostalgic blast of “Woman in Love”, from her collaboration album with Barry Gibb, Guilty.These days Streisand (present here only in archive clips) has become a grandiose diva in aspic, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The double album The Sound Gallery was issued in 1995. It collected British easy listening and library music tracks which had been mostly overlooked by reissue compilers as they were beyond a form of musical pale. The 24 cuts were, up to a few years earlier, neither hip or trendy as they were by stuffy old geezers like Joe Loss, aimed at a low-cred easy listening audience, not rare or had been heard by barely anyone as they had appeared on subscription-only music library albums. As a foundational exercise in delineation, The Sound Gallery became as influential a compilation as Nuggets.Side 2 Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Mitsuko Uchida continues her world tour of Schubert sonatas with two concerts for the home crowd, this the second of her appearances at the Festival Hall. The tour coincides with Uchida’s 70th birthday, but the years have done little to diminish her technique. And Schubert is an excellent choice, arguably her strongest suit – perhaps a joint first with Mozart – though her many recordings and performances in the past are little preparation for her always unpredictable approach.Schubert’s piano sonatas make demands on the pianist, both in technique and interpretation, and every player Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is Natasha Gordon’s first play, and in it she has created an entire world. A world of grief and laughter, conflict and closeness. A world that is very specifically located within Britain's Jamaican community, yet one whose themes of loss and belonging cross boundaries. Between the tears and the recriminations, it is also frequently very, very funny.“Nine Night” refers to the protracted funeral wake ritual that follows a death, which brings family and friends together to remember the departed, to recall the stories over nine nights fuelled by food and drink, music and words. Gordon’s Nine Read more ...
David Nice
With eyes swivelled towards who'll take over from Esa-Pekka Salonen as the Philharmonia's Principal Conductor in 2021, two of the strongest possibilities are to be found within the orchestra's masthead of associates. Another Finn, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, currently a great choice as the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra's trailblazer, and that best of Czechs Jakub Hrůša, chief in Bamberg, are already serving up electrifying events unsurpassed on the London concert scene, and Rouvali's all-Richard Strauss programme last night was the real deal. Eventually.It started with quite some wilful pulling- Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
The Old Vic's revival of its successful Christmas Carol first seen this time last year had me at the mince pies: they were served before curtain up by a Bob Cratchit figure while we admired the shoal of Victorian lanterns lighting the way over a cross-shaped stage that cuts the audience into quarters. Top-hatted gentlemen and gentleladies in swishing black great coats strolled about tossing oranges. One waved a sign that said, "Please do not use your mobile phones in the auditorium," which could have been more appropriately phrased but did at least keep the devices from being doused in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite having enjoyed a prolific few years in which he has appeared in (among others) All Is Lost, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Truth and Our Souls at Night, Robert Redford has said that The Old Man & the Gun will be his last film role. That might have turned out to be a disastrous hostage to fortune, so it’s delightful to report that this is as fine and affectionate a send-off as any movie icon could wish.Written and directed by David Lowery and based on a New Yorker article by David Grann, it’s the real-life story of career bank-robber and inveterate jailbreaker Forrest Tucker Read more ...