America
A Night with Janis Joplin: The Musical, Peacock Theatre review - belting Blues singing in an oddly sanitised formatThursday, 29 August 2024
The signs in the Peacock’s foyer warn that this show features "very loud music”. Exactly what Janis Joplin fans want to hear. This is an evening for them, more a concert than a piece of musical theatre.As a gig-musical, it is a five-star belter,... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: Ni Mi Madre / Bi-Curious George: Queer PlanetTuesday, 20 August 2024
Ni Mi Madre, Pleasance Dome ★★★★ Philip Larkin offered a famously pithy assessment of parents’ impact on their offspring’s future lives. It’s one that Brazilian/Ecuadorian/Italian/Dominican writer and performer Arturo Luíz Soria would no doubt... Read more... |
Album: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings - WoodlandSaturday, 17 August 2024
Named after the duo’s Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, badly damaged in a 2020 tornado and restored by them, Woodland Studios is Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ first album in four years, when All the Good Times won the Grammy for Best... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: The Sound Inside / So YoungTuesday, 13 August 2024
The Sound Inside, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★ Adam Rapp’s unapologetically intricate, bookish two-hander arrives for its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre following a successful run in New York, including no fewer than six Tony nominations. It’s not a... Read more... |
Trap review - how not to find a serial killer in a haystackMonday, 12 August 2024
Don’t think too hard about the narrative absurdity of Trap, the new movie wriitten and directed by M Night Shyamalan. There’s a serial killer called The Butcher on the loose in Philadelphia and though the FBI doesn’t know their quarry’s name or what... Read more... |
The Grapes of Wrath, NT Lyttelton review - a bleak journey into migrant purgatoryFriday, 09 August 2024
It’s a brave company that embarks on a staging of John Steinbeck’s award-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. A grim study of human goodness in an unrelentingly cruel universe, it’s a long slog for both cast and audience.Steinbeck based his novel... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: The Mosinee Project / Gwyneth Goes SkiingTuesday, 06 August 2024
The Mosinee Project, Underbelly Cowgate ★★★★In May 1950, a small US town awoke to hammer-and-sickle flags hanging from lamp-posts, its local newspaper transformed into a Soviet propaganda journal, its citizens’ firearms confiscated and handed... Read more... |
Prom 21, Osborne, Sinfonia of London, Wilson review - a spectacular drive across AmericaMonday, 05 August 2024
Does John Wilson ever stumble?The Sinfonia of London, the Gateshead-born conductor’s ad hoc all-star super-band, rode into a full-to-bursting Royal Albert Hall once again last night with an all-American Proms programme that promised not just crowd-... Read more... |
Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple, Sky Documentaries review - the New Jersey rocker with many strings to his bowMonday, 05 August 2024
The music scene on the New Jersey shore in the late Sixties and early Seventies must have been a thing of wonder, a kind of Merseymania-on-Sea. Its mix of soul, R&B and primitive rock’n’roll fuelled countless groups, not least Southside Johnny... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The ConversationTuesday, 30 July 2024
“I don’t care what they’re talking about,” says the best bugger in the business, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). “I just want a nice fat tape.”In the minor-key masterpiece Francis Ford Coppola made in the brief interlude between The Godfather (... Read more... |
Lady in the Lake, Apple TV+ review - a multi-layered Baltimore murder mysterySaturday, 27 July 2024
Laura Lippman’s source novel for Apple’s new drama became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2019, and director Alma Har’el’s screen realisation has fashioned it into an absorbing dive into various social, racial and political... Read more... |
I Saw the TV Glow - electrifying allegory of gender dysphoriaSaturday, 27 July 2024
There comes a point in I Saw the TV Glow when the repressed high-schooler Owen (Justice Smith) smashes his television’s screen by trying to dive into the box itself, to cross the great divide between his numbed reality and the feminine supernatural... Read more... |
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