America
Matt Wolf
It's not easy these days to stay the course on stage, with one leading female character after another of late failing to make it to the final curtain. I'm thinking of such otherwise diverse heroines as Shakespeare's Juliet and Andrew Lloyd Webber's haunted soprano, Christine, as well as the fraught Fosca of Stephen Sondheim's Passion, who may just remain the last word in women snatched prematurely from the men in their midst. To that list can now be added Jenny Cavilleri, the music-minded 25-year-old at the eternally doomy heart of Love Story, a show whose subtitle could, in fact, be Love Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Americans apparently revere their great racehorses, especially if they carry their weight in socio-political resonance - or its absence. Thus, the $58 million-grossing Secretariat, about the powerful red chestnut with the inordinately huge heart whose bid to win the 1973 US Triple Crown supposedly diverted attention from Watergate and Vietnam, arrived comparatively quickly after Seabiscuit, the 2003 Best Picture Oscar nominee and second film about the undersized knobbly-kneed bay who thrilled Americans during the Great Depression.Australia, too, celebrated its equine hero of the Depression Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Easier with Practice is a film about phone sex based on a short story that appeared in GQ magazine. It’s enough to make any right-thinking filmgoer not in the Will Ferrell/Chuck Palahniuk/American Pie core demographic head for another screen – any other screen. But peek under the covers of this indie debut from writer-director Kyle Patrick Alvarez, a decorated hero of this year’s festival circuit, and you’ll find an unexpectedly tender meditation on intimacy – a film set to do for phone sex what 2007’s charming Lars and the Real Girl did for sex dolls.Easier with Practice is a film about Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month theartsdesk attempts to answer burning questions like - how much of an egomaniac is Kanye West? Are Take That any good? (Yes, actually - surprisingly for some). Can you tell the difference between Rumer and Duffy? What kind of pencil does Brian Eno resemble - 2B or 6H? Is Sylvie Vartan better than Cilla Black? Plus there's intimate stuff from the vaults of Bruce Springsteen, grooviness from Congotronics, a dull one from Kate Rusby, some splendid bluegrass and an epic 27-CD box set of Fela Kuti. Reviewers are Joe Muggs, Adam Sweeting, Howard Male, Kieron Tyler, Russ Coffey, Bruce Read more ...
David Nice
Events surrounding the birth of the unrepentantly "un-American" Marc Blitzstein's early (1936-7) shot at socially aware music-theatre prove much more interesting than the show itself. Heck, I got more out of reading the programme than I did sitting through the whole darned thing. Let's face it, Blitzstein's mostly foursquare marriage of words and music sucks. Not that the dynamic Mehmet Ergen's latest Arcola team didn't give it their best shot.
The Cradle Will Rock, you see, has as fascinating a history as its classically trained, pianistically gifted and homosexual creator (and you may Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Joy Division brought Anton Corbijn to England in 1979 and, nearly 30 years later, made him a cinema director. The sleeve of the band’s album Unknown Pleasures fascinated him so deeply he felt compelled to leave Holland for the country where such mysteries were made. The photographs he took of them for the NME helped make an icon of their singer Ian Curtis even before his 1980 suicide, and were themselves icons of a school of serious, black-and-white rock photography.Corbijn restlessly challenged himself to change styles through the 1990s, making rock videos as well as portraits. Finally, in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just about the time you're losing patience with the Young Vic revival of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie - wondering at some of the variable accents and directorial overembellishments and the heavy sledding accompanying this most fragile and beautiful of plays - along comes one of the great, prolonged encounters of all 20th-century drama: that between an emotionally indrawn, "crippled" (in more ways than one) young woman and the scarcely less damaged swain who all too briefly offers salvation in a natty suit. And suddenly, as another character in a later Williams play would go on to Read more ...
peter.quinn
It's a curious fact that, for whole swathes of the music-buying public, their jazz collection has never grown beyond the ubiquitous Kind of Blue. OK, it's a seminal masterpiece which continues to sell like shovels in a snow storm. But why stop there? Perhaps the music's slightly arcane nomenclature has something to do with it: modal jazz, free jazz, fusion, bebop. Where to start? Well, with the publication this week of the 10th edition of the Penguin Jazz Guide – subtitled "The History of the Music in the 1001 Best Albums" - we now have an answer. In terms of navigating through the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Todd Phillips’s interest in road trips as a hook for 90 minutes of male bad behaviour continues with this virtual remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. For mismatched couple Steve Martin and John Candy, read Robert Downey Jr and Zach Galifianakis. “I despise you on a cellular level,” Downey Jr tells the latter, whose boundless stupidity directly causes him to be banned from plane travel by Homeland Security, battered by a wheelchair-bound Iraq veteran, have his arm broken in a car crash, shot (twice) and arrested by Mexican border guards. You can’t blame him.Phillips’s films are slowly Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I’ll retain lifelong, life-changing memories of the joyous mysteries of Merce Cunningham’s dances, so it’s unimportant for me that Nearly Ninety, his final creation before his death last year, won’t be one of them. Naturally his company brought it like a memorial on their farewell world tour before the troupe closes down, but last night’s UK premiere of it at the Barbican felt both sketchy and cumbersome, overburdened with fussy set and effects, and underburdened with the usual vigour and unearthly certainty of his dance. I’m happy to find that MCDC will make London one more pass next autumn Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly Ninety, and this is fittingly the last thing we will see of his company as it blazes one final circuit before closing down in December 2011. With work as exacting as his, it is inconceivable for his dancers to continue to operate as a full-time company without him, and so the grave decision was taken to carry out a final two-year tour around the Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
They drink, they swear, they get high, they play air guitar: but it all looks a little sad, and more than a little desperate, when the red-blooded, all-American dudes involved are middle-aged, with the beer guts and the emotional baggage to match. This new play by US writer Brett Neveu is a noisy riff on disillusion, ageing and the hollow promise of the American Dream. It’s a little over an hour long, and it’s fine as far at it goes. The trouble is, for all the flair of Jo McInnes’s well-acted production, for all its blood, booze and testosterone and all its noisy revving, it never really Read more ...