America
Album: Miranda Lambert - Postcards From TexasFriday, 20 September 2024
Miranda Lambert is one of those country stars who’s massive in the States but no-one’s heard of this side of the Atlantic. Famous since her early twenties, she’s had a quarter century career, encompassing seven Top Five US albums, including one... Read more... |
The Lightest Element, Hampstead Theatre review - engrossing, but fragmentaryThursday, 19 September 2024
British theatre has a proud heritage of science plays. From 1990s classics such as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) to more recent examples such as Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes (2017) and Marek Horn’s Octopolis (2023... Read more... |
Here comes the flood: Bob Dylan's 1974 Live RecordingsWednesday, 18 September 2024
Lighters at the ready, because here comes the flood. Drawn from 16-track tape, 1/4in reels and lo-fi sound board cassettes that are now a half century old, the 27 CDs of 431 performances, 417 of them previously unreleased, of Dylan and The Band’s... Read more... |
The Perfect Couple, Netflix review - an inconvenient death ruins lavish Nantucket weddingFriday, 13 September 2024
Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is an expensively-dressed fable about a lavish wedding in Nantucket, the desirable island paradise off Cape Cod, which on this evidence is an enclave of conspicuous wealth and gross moral... Read more... |
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review - a lively resurrectionTuesday, 10 September 2024
Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many... Read more... |
The Silver Cord, Finborough Theatre review - Sophie Ward is compellingly repellentSaturday, 07 September 2024
One of the Finborough Theatre’s Artistic Director, Neil McPherson’s, gifts is an uncanny ability to find long-forgotten plays that work, right here, right now. He’s struck gold again with The Silver Cord, presenting its first London production for... Read more... |
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... |
