America
howard.male
Although this is a review of an album and not a single song, Rhiannon Giddens’s extraordinary “Mama’s Cryin’ Long” is the hub (or perhaps emotional black hole might be a more apt description) around which the rest of this collection of new material inspired by historical accounts of slavery revolves. Nothing is more heartbreaking and chilling than a song brimming with pain that’s been designed to uplift. And of course slavery itself produced many such songs. But after just one listen to this extraordinary piece of call-and-response storytelling – with each of its vivid yet economic lines Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning. The premise of Sam Bourne’s thrilling novel is the existence of a conspiracy to annihilate all the evidence of historic atrocities through the millennia. Books, of course, must go, and in a neat twist even the biggest book distribution centres, Amazon included, are targeted. Bourne’s great gift is to take reality and give it a good shove, a what if? that we are persuaded Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An entirely electric leading performance from the fast-rising Ukweli Roach is the reason for being for revisiting Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, back in London for the first major production since the late Philip Seymour Hoffman brought his acclaimed Off Broadway premiere of it to the Donmar in 2002. Since then, author Stephen Adly Guirgis has to be honest written better plays, not least the thrilling The Motherf**er with the Hat which doesn't try so hard to flag its bravura at every turn. Kate Hewitt's revival for the Young Vic rides the inbuilt energy of the play, but the net result is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just when you think you may have heard (and seen) enough of Donald J Trump to last a lifetime, along comes Anne Washburn's ceaselessly smart and tantalising Shipwreck to focus renewed attention on the psychic fallout left by 45. How did we get here from there? Washburn certainly brushes up against the topic that animated a recent, similarly Trump-inflected play, Sweat. But Washburn's purposefully baggy, shape-shifting play resists categorisation at every turn: equal measures history play, polemic, and generational saga, Shipwreck confounds expectation and may at times confound an Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When the world is as crazy as it is right now, its political life dominated by dolts and villains, it needs a new kind of hero. That’s why Americans are embracing an octogenarian woman with more guts and integrity than virtually anyone at her level of public life, and why in quick succession we’ve had two films about her. The Oscar-nominated documentary RBG was released in January and is still available in some cinemas and on streaming platforms. It tells the story of the now 85-year-old Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a remarkable woman who in the Read more ...
David Nice
Ripeness is sometimes all. 80-year-old Martin Sherman's recent play, receiving its UK premiere at canny Park Theatre, says more about gay history in 100 selective minutes than The Inheritance managed in six and a half hours. True, it's not aiming at the visionary: Sherman knows that's best left to Larry Kramer, recalled as prophet and patriarch in AIDS-ravaged New York, and to Tony Kushner's Angels in America. But with three fine actors deftly directed by Sean Mathias, Gently Down the Stream – taking its name from the "Row, row, row" roundel the main character's wise old saviour remembers Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A musicals-intensive season gets off to a wan start with 9 to 5, a retooled West End version of a 2009 Broadway flop based on the beloved 1980 film that proffered a sisterhood for the ages in the combo of Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin. Parton gets bigtime producing billing on a stage venture for which she has provided a so-so (albeit Tony-nominated) score, and her shining face graces the onstage screens to clue us into the none-too-difficult plot and provide a fairly hoary Donald Trump joke. But it's clear pretty much from the start that Jeff Calhoun's production is aiming low and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This year’s unofficial Arthur Miller season – following The Price and ahead of All My Sons at the Old Vic and Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic – now turns to his 1980 work, The American Clock, inspired in part by Miller’s own memories of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and subsequent Great Depression. It’s also based on Studs Terkel’s oral history Hard Times, and the combination is an uneasy one: a Miller-esque American family used as microcosm, but also constant diversions to other people and places in a sprawling three hours.Central to the play is the Baum clan: father Moe, initially a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Women spend a lot of time gazing at themselves in the mirror in the Belgian auteur director Ivo van Hove's latest stage-to-screen deconstruction, All About Eve, which is based on one of the most-beloved of all films about the theatre: the 1950 Oscar-winner of the same name. And well these varying generations of stage talents might want to anatomise every pore. Advancing age kills figuratively, if not literally, in the landscape of a play that may bear the same title as Joseph L Mankiewicz's iconic backstage story but conveys its own entirely (and deliberately) different import and impact. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a rather sublime equilibrium to Arthur Miller’s 1968 play between the overwhelmingly heavy weight of history and a sheer life force that somehow functions, against all odds, as its counterbalance. But in purely dramatic terms the scales of The Price are tipped from the moment that Gregory Solomon, octogenarian second-hand furniture dealer extraordinaire, wheezes his way into the action. David Suchet’s peerless performance, flavoured with a masterful spiel that puts his character squarely (and knowingly) in the traditions of Jewish comedy, has such bravado insouciance that everything Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In an interview with Fritz Lang towards the end of his life, he dismisses Human Desire as a film he was contractually obliged to make and for which he had no great fondness. Certainly it isn’t his masterpiece, but it’s a lot more interesting than its director allows and worth revisiting in this restored reissue.Made in 1954, two years after Lang’s American tour de force The Big Heat, Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame are once again in front of his camera. This time Ford is the hero, Jeff Warren, returning from the war in Korea to his job as a train engineer riding the rails. Much Read more ...
howard.male
Who doesn’t like the rolling swagger of a bunch of seasoned Louisiana musicians? And that’s what New Yorker McCalla has assembled here to create a wider sound pallet for her third album. But we don’t just get a dozen generic New Orleans jazz tunes here. There’s also a calypso, a Zydeco dance number, a rollicking boogie-woogie and a doom-laden rocker with a Hendrix-style solo from Jimmy Horn that's like a knife slashing a canvas. And then to go straight into a Hawaiian guitar-drenched ballad?! I’ve not heard such a delightful collision of moods since the Velvets set “The Black Angel Death Song Read more ...