America
Jenny Gilbert
Dance lovers with no access to a major city could feel genuinely hard done by were it not for Dance Consortium. This sainted organisation works to bring a company from overseas each autumn to a dozen or so large-scale theatres across the UK and Ireland – theatres whose dance offering might otherwise rarely extend beyond the latest Strictly spin-off.This year it’s the turn of Ailey 2, the younger sibling of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater that barely three weeks ago was garnering glowing reviews at Sadler’s Wells. And while it’s neither uncommon nor new for a major dance company to field a Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Less is more, except when it isn’t. Among the latest batch of overlong Oscar-tipped movies by celebrated auteurs such as Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer with a running time of 181 minutes) and Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon, 207 mins), it’s a relief to find the iconic Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar bucking the trend with a 31-minute short that doesn’t test the audience’s mental and physical stamina.His second English-language movie is visually more ambitious than its predecessor, The Human Voice (2020), a short monologue adapted from Jean Cocteau and starring Tilda Swinton. Read more ...
David Nice
Big Ben was chiming the quarter-hour as I hit the South Bank side of the river after a not terribly inspiring Remain rally in Parliament Square. What delight, then, to hear the wacky and wonderful Carol Williams playing Vierne’s “Carillon de Westminster” as the opening fanfare of her Royal Festival Hall organ hour. It’s one of my two favouite organ voluntaries – the other being the most famous, “the Widor Toccata”, and she ended with that. All was well, in fact, from start to finish.Williams announced at the beginning of her First Person piece for theartsdesk that she’d sat through so many “ Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The work of the double Pulitzer-winning Black American dramatist Lynn Nottage has thankfully become a fixture in the UK. After its award-winning production of Sweat, the Donmar will stage the UK premiere of her Clyde’s next month, and MJ the Musical, for which she wrote the book, arrives in the West End in March 2024.But not to be missed right now is her 2018 play Mlima’s Tale at the Kiln. Out of a magazine article about the ivory trade, Nottage has spun a Brechtian yarn of corruption and mendacity, minus the Verfremdung and with a surprising number of laughs, that suggests a whole world Read more ...
Carol Williams
I have always had a fascination with concert programmes. I did my Doctorate thesis on this subject. I remember vividly as a youngster attending many uninteresting programmes and thinking “there has to be more exciting, exhilarating, interesting music for the concert goer!” What type of repertoire makes audiences come back to solo organ concerts?The varied repertoire kept me alive and my studies at the Royal Academy of Music with David Sanger were priceless. I came from a musical family - Dad had an amazing ability to play the theatre organ, Mum the piano and Aunt Olwen played organ in church Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jenna Coleman has had a mostly upbeat acting CV to date, notably playing Clara in Doctor Who and the young Queen in ITV’s Victoria. The mood darkened with her excellent turn as the French-Canadian girlfriend of the mass murderer in The Serpent; now it turns to pitch with Wilderness.This time Coleman is Liv and attemptedly Welsh (the accent comes and goes), recently married to aspirational Englishman Will (Oliver Jackson Cohen), who is promoted to a plum job in New York by the luxury hotel company he works for. There, in her sumptuous apartment, where she is ostensibly writing an untitled Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Saphead gave Buster Keaton his first starring role in a full-length comedy, but 1923’s Three Ages is the first feature film which he wrote, produced, directed and starred in. Two-reelers were a form where he could go, in his words, “wild and crazy”, the more outlandish the visual humour the better.Feature films were based on narrative flow, Keaton later commenting that the jokes “had to be believable or your story wouldn’t hold up.” Watch Our Hospitality or The General and you’ll see what he means. Still, the gags which really stand out in Three Ages are the daft, unbelievable ones: Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The journey from off-Broadway to central London has taken 15 years, but the multi-award-winning musical Next to Normal has finally made it. That time lag may lead to suspicions that its subject matter has become a tad outmoded, but this staging, directed by outgoing Donmar director Michael Longhurst, is fresh and affecting.The scene looks set for a conventional tale of middle-age crisis, of a “normal” middle-class kind. Diana and Dan live in a glass box they designed themselves – they met as architecture students – complete with Bulthaup-style minimal kitchen and stainless steel fridge. Read more ...
David Nice
Funfairs and dance music, old world and new, should have guaranteed a corker of a second Prom from the Boston Symphony Orchestra with its chief conductor, Andris Nelsons. Glitter it did; but wit, drive and violence took a back seat to showcase sophistication, at least from where I was sitting in the hall (always a necessary qualification)If Nelsons seems to have lost the spark of his vintage days with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, his polish fits the classy Boston band very well – there’s little of the brave new brashness of the New York Philharmonic from these players, though Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Optimistically billed as John Travolta’s comeback, writer-director Nicholas Maggio’s debut is an effective Southern noir, with Travolta an authoritative but peripheral presence.Mob Land is mostly about Shelby Connors (Shiloh Fernandez), a small-town ex-racing driver with Parkinson’s, struggling to make ends meet with his wife Caroline (Ashley Benson) and daughter. Repossession threatens his home, where Caroline’s brother Trey (Kevin Dillon, pictured below left with Fernandez) spends his time, and suggests the bad choice that will send them to hell. A local pharmacy is a Mob front pushing Read more ...
David Kettle
CHOO CHOO! (Or... Have You Ever Thought About ****** **** *****? (Cos I Have)), Pleasance Dome ★★★★Nye and Duncan seem to live a charmed life. Clad in primary-coloured dungarees, they begin their days with a song, and see what adventures the radio has in store for them. Maybe today they’ll be play-acting a game show, or recreating a famous movie scene. Anything to fill the time. Most importantly, they’re counting the days until their holiday. Well, Duncan is.There are a lot of laughs to be had at new company StammerMouth’s slightly sinister send-up of children’s entertainers, but Read more ...
David Kettle
Dark Noon, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★★If there’s a more ambitious theatre production than Dark Noon at the Fringe this year, I’ve yet to see it. That’s ambitious in terms of its staging: during the course of the show’s 100 minutes (yes, it’s a proper, full-length production), virtually an entire town is constructed on a bare red-earth stage right before our eyes. But it’s also ambitious in terms of its themes and subject matter. This is the history of the Wild West, the great American push to the Pacific, frontier pioneers, gold rushes and the law of the gun. It’s a world of corruption Read more ...