1920s
The Great Gatsby, Immersive London review – a warm and electric tribute to the bookFriday, 23 October 2020
The Prohibition-era setting of The Great Gatsby brings an appropriately illicit feel to this bold decision to stage an immersive theatre event in the age of Covid. Where, in 1922, champagne was the essential liquid to get any evening going... Read more... |
Album: Loudon Wainwright III with Vince Giordano & The Nighthawks – I’d Rather Lead a BandMonday, 05 October 2020
Those Wainwrights, they never cease to surprise. Get out your soft shoes and prepare to shuffle, for the “six-string diarist” has set his guitar aside and put on his metaphorical tux to croon with a band on more than a dozen timeless classics. Songs... Read more... |
BBC Proms live online: Viennese Night review - sophisticated pleasuresTuesday, 01 September 2020
Viennese operetta is like that other great Central European treat, goulash. It comes in many forms. In Vienna it’s coffeehouse comfort food; in Slovenia they add bacon for a smoky tang. And in the marketplaces of Transylvania it comes in bubbling... Read more... |
Tutankhamun in Colour, BBC Four review - amazing enhanced images bring fabled Pharaoh to lifeFriday, 19 June 2020
Tut in colour, and he is! The new painstaking technique of colourising vintage black and white photographs and film was touchingly exploited in this documentary for BBC Four to narrate the most thrilling and best-known archaeological discovery ever... Read more... |
Alex George: The Paris Hours review - captivating yet frustratingSunday, 03 May 2020
A century on, the années folles of Paris between the wars do not cease to excite readers and writers of all varieties. Alex George’s latest novel, The Paris Hours, draws on the myriad charms the interwar period has to offer, condensing them into a... Read more... |
DVD: Babylon Berlin Series 1-3Sunday, 26 April 2020
There are bad times just around the corner for the characters of Babylon Berlin, though 1929 is grim enough. Focusing on the moment to take away the easy option of hindsight for the viewer and making its vast line-up, played by actors of supreme... Read more... |
Sinatra: All Or Nothing At All, Netflix review - epic two-parter on pop's first superstarThursday, 26 March 2020
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century.... Read more... |
Max Raabe, Palast-Orchester, Cadogan Hall review - escapism with ironyThursday, 05 March 2020
Escapism sometimes feels not just useful but necessary. To be carried back, for an evening, to the world of the 1920s/1930s dance band, with foxtrots, pasodobles, crisp starched collars and secco endings, of slick hair and even slicker arrangements... Read more... |
Berlinale 2020: Berlin Alexanderplatz review - a contemporary twist on a classicThursday, 27 February 2020
Burhan Qurbani isn’t the first director to bring Alfred Döblin’s seminal 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, to the screen. First, there was the Weimar Republic era adaptation that Döblin himself worked on. Fifty years later, Rainer Werner... Read more... |
Mahler's Eighth, CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla, Symphony Hall Birmingham review - a symphony of 600Monday, 20 January 2020
“Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound” wrote Gustav Mahler of his Eighth Symphony. “There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” It’s an image that captures the impossible scale and mind-boggling... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The GolemTuesday, 19 November 2019
A lumbering, barrel-chested hulk with a weirdly Ancient Egyptian wedge of hair, the eponymous clay monster of Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World compensates for his limited intelligence with brute strength and a... Read more... |
Tetzlaff, Nelsen, Philharmonia, Salonen, RFH review - spider's webs and silk sheetsMonday, 30 September 2019
You can't expect a full house when the only work approaching a repertoire staple on your programme is Berg's Lulu Suite. Yet Esa-Pekka Salonen was able to serve up what must count as one of the most enthralling Philharmonia programmes ever at the... Read more... |
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