Reviews
Marianka Swain
The resplendent partnership of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman – which produced Disney hits Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid – first took root with this 1982 Off-Broadway musical, based on a low-budget Sixties film, about a man seeking love and fortune via a bloodthirsty plant. This revelatory revival from Maria Aberg embraces the work’s B-movie dichotomy: equal parts dark, gory fable and riotous carnival of delights.Orphaned Seymour (Marc Antolin) is nerdy assistant to the Skid Row florist who took him in as a child. He pines after colleague Audrey (Jemima Rooper, Read more ...
David Kettle
It was Simon Rattle’s first visit to the Edinburgh International Festival for – well, really quite a few years. And the first of his two concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra drew, perhaps predictably, a capacity crowd in the Usher Hall, for what was in fact quite an odd, uncompromising programme – if one that ultimately delivered magnificently.The fizzing chemistry that Rattle and the LSO players have clearly built up over their first season together was blazingly evident – not least in the concert’s gargantuan opener, Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety. Rattle was Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Chekhovian is a rather over-used word when it comes to describing some of the late Brian Friel's best work, but you can see why it might apply to Aristocrats, his 1979 play which premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin before becoming a contemporary classic. You can count off the elements that remind you of the Russia master: decaying estates, feckless toffs, wistful longings and missed opportunities. Aristocrats is now revived by Lyndsey Turner, whose previous Friel re-stagings at the Donmar - Faith Healer and Philadelphia, Here I Come! - have all been very successful. And she has already Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alex Edelman ★★★★★When Alex Edelman first appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 he walked off with the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer. Now in his third stand-up show, Just For Us, he delivers a beautifully constructed hour of narrative comedy.He starts with Koko the sign-language-speaking gorilla and ends with how Nazis are hiding in plain sight. That he gets from one to the other in an hour that includes anecdotes about meeting Prince William, receiving anti-Semitic abuse online, his brother who competed in the Winter Olympics for Israel (“or Schul Runnings as I call Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
I’m still not entirely sure what the full associations of the title of New York playwright Jordan Seavey’s new play – its second element, at least: the first speaks for itself – may be, but with writing this accomplished any such uncertainties fall away. Homos, or Everyone in America powerfully combines smart wit and smarting pain, and its inherent energy comes across beautifully in a production from Josh Seymour that positively fizzes (this is the play’s European premiere, after an acclaimed Off Broadway debut two years ago).You might think that Seavey is being equally elliptical about his Read more ...
David Kettle
Underground Railroad Game ★★★★★ The game of the show’s title is a fun educational exercise on the US Civil War devised by Teacher Caroline and Teacher Stuart at Hanover Middle School, with the aim of bringing alive the flight of slaves from the south to the north. Can the kids playing Unionist soliders move the slave dolls between the school’s safe-house boxes, without the fugitives being captured by the Confederates?The title also refers, perhaps, the far more adult games taking place between the two teachers as they play out their (or, perhaps more correctly, Teacher Stuart’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So far Jon Hamm has had trouble finding himself movie roles which fit him quite as impeccably as Mad Men’s Don Draper – though he could do worse than throw his hat in the ring for James Bond – but his role here as an American diplomat in Beirut plays obligingly to his strengths. A tale of twisted loyalties and spookish double-dealing, it’s directed by Brad Anderson from a 25-year-old script by Tony Gilroy (a veteran of the Bourne franchise and writer/director of Michael Clayton), and gives Hamm room to probe the porous boundaries of love, loss, loyalty and betrayal.The story begins in 1972, Read more ...
David Benedict
It was all about the acoustic. Well, almost. Disregarding the awe-inspiring grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, there’s a school of thought that believes the Proms is the world’s greatest concert series in the world’s worst hall. Why? Because its problematic acoustic is so ungovernable. It certainly wreaked havoc in Sunday’s Prom of the Brandenburg Concertos – I’ve never heard professional orchestral playing so lacking in ensemble – and in this intriguing Anglo-American BBC Philharmonic concert, the cavernous space proved as much a hindrance as a help.Initially, it was all gain. Juanjo Mena Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The heart of Prom 33 was Brahms’s massive German Requiem, a piece that eschews Christian dogma and Day-of-Judgment terrors for a humanism focusing on consolation of the bereaved. It feels very much like a requiem for our times as much as the composer’s, and last night’s performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Richard Farnes, although very traditional in style, had a striking immediacy.But first came Thea Musgrave’s Phoenix Rising, the Proms premiere of a 20-year-old piece. In the year the Proms committed to increasing its representation of women composers it is also marking Read more ...
David Kettle
Coriolanus Vanishes ★★★★ Writer and director David Leddy was himself the original solo performer in his Coriolanus Vanishes when it premiered in Glasgow in 2017. But in this powerful, visually stunning outing as part of the Traverse’s very strong festival programme this year, its actor is Irene Allan. It’s a change of gender that casts the work in an entirely new light (and in fact, you can’t help but imagine Leddy’s fragmented monologue from a male perspective), but one that simultaneously changes nothing.As with so much of his work, Leddy’s Coriolanus Vanishes dovetails the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Dark Web has an intriguing sound about it. Like something out of JRR Tolkein or JK Rowling, it suggests a netherland peopled by strange creatures, and maybe even dangerous monsters. As indeed it is. Television writer Alex Oates’s 60-minute monologue, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe and made history in 2014 as the first show to be crowdfunded by, among others, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, has an richly evocative title and now, after an outing at the Vaults in January, makes an appearance in the West End. The fruit of Oates’s interviews with online drug dealers, it explores the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Prom 31 featured an American orchestra playing an all-American programme – until the final encore dived thrillingly into a completely different musical tradition. But one of the principal features of American music – its joyous risk-taking – was undermined by conductor Osmo Vänskä’s cautious tempos, and the orchestral playing only periodically caught fire.This started with a somewhat routine performance of Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant Candide overture. In recent times it has been heard more at the Proms as an encore than a curtain-raiser, and perhaps does work better as a glorious sign-off, Read more ...