1930s
The Lady Vanishes, BBC OneMonday, 18 March 2013
This story is mostly familiar from Alfred Hitchchock's 1938 movie, starring Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood. Among the things it's best remembered for are the comic double act of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, playing the cricket-obsessed... Read more... |
Liza Minnelli, Royal Festival HallSaturday, 02 March 2013
It’s Weimar Berlin time as the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival moves through the 20th-century music scene – so it must be Liza Minnelli time too. Or must it? Though she’s immortalised through her Americanisation of Sally Bowles in Bob... Read more... |
Dancing on the Edge, Series Finale, BBC TwoTuesday, 26 February 2013
Stephen Poliakoff's slow-burning drama had turned into a propulsive whodunnit by this final episode, hurtling towards a resolution with panache and surprise. The five-part mini-series about a black jazz band in early 1930s high society has had the... Read more... |
Lulu, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 09 February 2013
What-ifs and might-have-beens are usually as pointless in music as in any other walk of life. Still one can’t help wondering how Alban Berg would have completed – and, no less interesting, revised – his opera Lulu, if he hadn’t been stung by some... Read more... |
Tango Fire: Flames of Desire, Peacock TheatreThursday, 07 February 2013
If by the end of a show you’ve both wowed and ouched out loud, I would declare it’s safe to say you’re getting your money's-worth. Tango Fire's new show at the Peacock Theatre, Flames of Desire, does all the above and more. In fact it could be... Read more... |
A Young Doctor's Notebook, Sky Arts 1Thursday, 06 December 2012
Bulgakov gets about more than you’d think. As a character in the play Collaborators, the Russian novelist was most recently seen helping Stalin with his memoirs. Within the last couple of years his novels The Master and Margarita and The White Guard... Read more... |
DVD: Boris Barnet - Outskirts/By the Bluest of SeasTuesday, 13 November 2012
Boris Barnet may not be as well known in film circles as his contemporaries Sergei Eisenstein or Alexander Dovzhenko, but his role in the first decade of Soviet cinema was no less important. What he lacks in the more pronounced... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Florence: Hating the Sin, Loving the SinnerSunday, 28 October 2012
Perhaps the longest-lasting, the oddest – and almost certainly the most gratuitous – battle still busy raging with its roots in the ideological conflicts of the past century is the one regarding the artistic output of Italy’s engagement with Fascism... Read more... |
Interview: 10 Questions for Diana KrallMonday, 22 October 2012
Jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall has won two Grammys and sold more than 15 million albums worldwide. Born in 1964 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, she attended Berklee College of Music in the early 1980s and had her major breakthrough with... Read more... |
Coote, BBCSO, Saraste, Barbican HallThursday, 04 October 2012
Somehow the manic cry of “Scooby-Doo man!” from the back of the stalls didn’t seem too incongruous. We were in the thick of Shostakovich’s craziest symphony, the Fourth, composed in the mid 1930s when such maverick Russian talent was about to be... Read more... |
DVD: Cleopatra (1934)Sunday, 30 September 2012
Cleopatra didn’t hold a beast to her ass but in this lavish 1934 production, she could have. Cecil B DeMille amped up his two favourite topics - sex and sin - to create the world's second most opulent celluloid Cleopatra. Scripted by Waldemar Young... Read more... |
Private Lives, Chichester Festival TheatreSaturday, 29 September 2012
“Has it ever occurred to you that flippancy might cover a very real embarrassment?" Elyot's response to fulminating Victor is a line of defence – and since he has run off with Victor's wife Amanda he has a good deal of defending to do. But the line... Read more... |
