adaptation
Metamorphosis, Lyric Hammersmith review - vivid images, but where's the drama?Wednesday, 07 February 2024
Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a novella whose cultural resonance has echoed loudly down the years. As a modernist metaphor for alienation in our times it has frequently been adapted for the stage. There have been classic, and popular, adaptations... Read more... |
Bronco Billy, Charing Cross Theatre - schmaltzy musical brings the feelgood factor just when it's neededTuesday, 06 February 2024
When entering a particular, well-populated region of MusicalTheatreLand, one has to check in a few items at the border. Weary cynicism, the desire for narrative coherence, that nerve that starts to throb when sentimentality oozes across the fourth... Read more... |
The Zone of Interest review - garden gates of deathFriday, 02 February 2024
The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?The renowned chronicler of the death camps, Elie Wiesel, said that a... Read more... |
La Strada, Sadler's Wells review - a long and bumpy roadThursday, 01 February 2024
Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada ought to be a gift to a choreographer. The film has pathos, good and evil, a bewitchingly gamine heroine, and incidental music by the great Nino Rota, a composer who can find melancholy in the music of... Read more... |
The Most Precious of Goods, Marylebone Theatre review - old-fashioned storytelling of an all-too relevant taleTuesday, 30 January 2024
As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of... Read more... |
The Color Purple review - sensational second time round for Alice Walker's novel on screenSaturday, 27 January 2024
How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.Adapted by Steven Spielberg for the screen in 1985, and then as a Broadway musical that had two... Read more... |
The Good John Proctor, Jermyn Street Theatre review - Salem-set drama loses some of its power in LondonSaturday, 13 January 2024
It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it... Read more... |
Next Goal Wins review - football's lamentablesTuesday, 26 December 2023
For those who ever wonder if soccer scoreboards, or score-line captions on TV, can ever be made to reach three figures, consider the match between AS Adema and SO l’Emyrne, two teams in Madagascar, in 2002. It ended 149-0, but that was only because... Read more... |
The House with Chicken Legs, Queen Elizabeth Hall review - a potential charmer swamped by its settingMonday, 18 December 2023
There are probably two distinct audiences for the latest adaptation from Les Enfants Terribles, The House with Chicken Legs: the young teens who lapped up the fantasy novel by Sophie Anderson on which it is based, and the adults who came with them.... Read more... |
Nutcracker, Tuff Nutt Jazz Club, Royal Festival Hall review - a fresh, compelling, adult take on a festive favouriteWednesday, 13 December 2023
Intimacy isn’t everything, but there’s nothing like seeing dance live and up close. A good seat in a large theatre will give you the whole stage picture but lose the detail. Lost too will be that quasi-visceral connection with the movement.A... Read more... |
Wonka review - a confusingly mixed bag of bonbonsSaturday, 09 December 2023
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages?It’s an “origins” story, standard now for all manner of film character, showing the sunnier side of Roald Dahl’s eccentric... Read more... |
The Peasants review - earthbound animationSaturday, 09 December 2023
After a few years of cinema, the wow factor of seeing actual things moving about on a screen wore off a bit and showmen saw that jump cuts and stop-motion – the dawn of animation – could lift audiences some more. The liberation from gravity, in fact... Read more... |
