America
Nick Hasted
As the pandemic receded, Wilco huddled together in Jeff Tweedy’s Chicago studio and played country songs, an easefully naturally act as the world around them shook. Though famed for the experimental, eerily timely Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001) and the crackling electric contrails of its further-out follow-up A Ghost Is Born (2004), Wilco have often returned to simpler verities.Now their 12th album adds a recognisable branch to Tweedy’s ex-band Uncle Tupelo’s tree, as this founding father revisits Americana: 21 songs framed by steel and acoustic guitar, stripping himself and his country to their Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The 2001 Reese Witherspoon-starring film Legally Blonde, upon which Heather Hach, Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin’s peppy Broadway musical is based, was something of a Trojan horse: a bubblegum-pink comedy with a feminist spine.Now Lucy Moss, co-creator of the juggernaut Six, updates it further with progressive casting choices and a winning kitsch stylisation in this joyous 21st century revival. Malibu princess Elle Woods (Courtney Bowman) has it all: president of her sorority at UCLA, and on the cusp of getting engaged to her dream man, Warner Huntington III (Alistair Toovey). But Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Barry Gibb was at the considerable peak of his era-defining songwriting powers when he provided the song that played over the opening titles of the iconic 1978 film, so it's a wise decision by director, Nikolai Foster, to go straight into "Grease is the Word" after a brief prologue.The energetic dancing by the boys and girls of Rydell High, the strength of the harmonies and the warm familiarity of the tune builds two bridges – one back to the movie, the other across the fourth wall. For all its flaws, this new production recognises that, perhaps in big musicals more than any other genre Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Jude is the kind of girl that no-one would want to mess with – she can dance like a demon to Eric Clapton, skewer an ego in seconds and hit an apple from thirty feet with a knife. Yet in a play that’s so uncompromising it could give Neil LaBute a sprint for his money, what happens on the night of her seventeenth birthday raises questions that tear through the lives of her closest friends for decades.Naomi Wallace’s script burns like ice. It’s a coming-of-age story that asks profoundly uncomfortable questions about money, sex, class and violence. Yet it works because it also makes you Read more ...
David Nice
As the final slew of episodes in the last series of Ozark begins, Marty and Wendy Byrde, ever more the Macbeths of Osage Beach, are “in blood stepp’d in so far” that we don’t much care about their fate. Sympathy has long shifted to trailer girl Ruth Langmore, so clever and empathetic that in another life she would have taken wing, as much caught in the web of drug-dealing and cartels as her elders, but still the nearest thing we’re going to get to a moral core among the leading players.You wonder whether the team responsible for Ozark envisaged as big a role for Julia Garner when Ruth first Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is so much gospel out there that it’s not easy to stand out above the crowd. Mavis Staples, with a distinctive voice that has delivered a gritty contralto for many decades, never stops. This new release, a set of songs that were recorded in 2011, is a collaboration with the Band’s late drummer Levon Helm, a sure-fire fan of African-American church music.It’s a only just more than a decent collection, with a few moments of glory, not least a rocking and rolling version of the classic “You Got to Move”, but there's something a little too efficient rather than ecstatic about it, even if Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The real-life case of Michael Peterson and the death of his wife Kathleen in 2001 has generated a steady stream of TV documentaries, though this new series from HBO Max (showing on NOW) is the first time anybody has actually dramatised the story. With Colin Firth as Michael and Toni Collette as Kathleen, it’s a compelling mix of conspiracy theory, forensic detective thriller and legal drama, bristling with false trails and tantalising clues.The discovery of Kathleen’s battered and blood-soaked body at the bottom of the staircase at the family’s home in Durham, North Carolina sets the ball Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those films that are guaranteed to make an audience feel their age. Unless you’re steeped in the multiverse genre (The Matrix films, the Marvel canon, etc.) and are comfortable with absurdist pop culture memes, it may well leave you reeling. Brace yourself for two hours and 20 minutes of handbrake-turn jokes and surreal, comic action sequences. Divided into three parts, Everything focuses on Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), an immigrant from Hong Kong who runs a laundromat in the San Fernando Valley. She lives above the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
No surreys, fringes or corny chap-slapping: the Rodgers and Hammerstein revival that has arrived at the Young Vic from New York, trailing a Tony award, is no ordinary makeover. Daniel Fish, its director, has spent the best part of 15 years stripping down and remodelling the 1943 original. The framework of the story — of farmers and cowmen in 1906 Oklahoma Indian Territory, poised to join the union and warring over their womenfolk — is still there. But its new engine takes it to exciting and violent places. We enter the auditorium with the house lights on full beam. The room twice goes to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is at its most radical and corporate here; maybe decadent is the word. We start with surgeon turned sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) threatened then slaughtered in a cosmic chase sequence. It’s just a dream, then it isn’t, and so is/isn’t pretty much everything that follows. For a film due to be a huge mainstream hit, Doctor Strange in The Multiverse Of Madness is narratively anarchic, and dependent on degree-level knowledge of MCU arcana, clearly feeling, as this franchise invincibly warps and morphs, that we’ll take anything now.When the Doc wakes Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As Walter Huston croaked in 1938, it’s a long, long while from May to December. And Kurt Weill – who wrote his evergreen “September Song” for Huston in that year – spanned several musical epochs within not so many years as he travelled from the Weimar avant-garde to Hollywood and Broadway.At the Barbican, Simon Rattle’s all-Weill evening with the London Symphony Orchestra followed the composer’s obstacle-strewn but often triumphant journey in a programme that culminated in Weill’s “ballet chanté” The Seven Deadly Sins, with Magdalena Kožená (Lady Rattle) as the soloist. For Rattle, Weill’s Read more ...
Naomi Wallace
The Breach is a coming of age story and an age-in-the-making story. The play takes place in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1990s, switching back and forth between teenagers in Louisville and their older selves 15 years later. The promise of the 1970s in the US (and UK) when inequality was actively being reduced, and the undoing of that potential, are played out amongst this group of young friends. What I wanted to examine in the play is how societal pressures divide us from one another and how, when a betrayal strikes - that's to say, betrayal of one another and of youthful Read more ...