Canada
Jenny Gilbert
What to expect of the National Ballet of Canada since its last London visit 11 years ago? Dance with an eco-message, a world-peace message, or more visible diversity on stage?It's all there in the homegrown triple bill the company has brought to Sadler’s Wells. But the primary message seems to be that The Great White North has undergone a choreographic renaissance over the past decade, becoming a purveyor of hot-ticket choreographers to the wider world. This programme spans three generations of creators, each of whom challenges ballet tradition in their own way.In the case of James Read more ...
Gary Naylor
One wonders what sitcom writers will do when supermarkets finally sweep the last corner shops away with nobody left old enough to buy cigarettes, nobody so offline that they buy newspapers and nobody eating sweets, priced out by sugar taxes. The convenience shop is already acquiring a patina of nostalgia, crowned by a warm glow of happier days. My mother used to send me out aged seven to buy her Embassy Number 1s with me levying a charge of one gobstopper in payment - see, I’m a victim already. Appropriately, that old-school shop is on hand when you want a setting for a gentle, heartwarming, Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes that we associate with sketchy online activity. Instead the woman is doing the kind of amateur sleuthing that anybody with a computer and internet connection can do. Red Rooms' portrayal of an aspect of everyday life that too often feels stilted on the big screen is one of the many things this Quebecois thriller gets right. It Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A group of young people rent a cabin in the woods. A masked killer lingers nearby. Surely you know how the rest unfolds. The slasher and its well-worn tropes have been parodied, satirised and subverted for as long as it has existed. In fact, we seem to prefer watching these deconstructions compared to the actual, pulpy thing. Scream is after all the most successful horror franchise in history. But In a Violent Nature is arguably the most intriguing experiment in the genre so far. Here, the schlocky slasher is told from the perspective of a silent killer named Johnny who stalks a group of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Nature of Love joins a recent spate of films where older women enjoy what a mealy-mouthed columnist would describe as an inappropriate relationship. Whether it’s Olivia Colman bedding a much younger black colleague in Empire of Light, Emma Thompson hiring a sex worker in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, or Anne Hathaway shagging a boy-band singer in The Idea of You, the scenario allows for smooching and soul searching in equal measures. This time the risk-taker is a French-Canadian philosophy lecturer in a pleasant but passionless marriage. Sophia (Magalie Lépine- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Anniversary is Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s sixth album (if we include last year’s lengthy EP of lullabies). Her success has not reached much beyond her native land, as is often the way with Canadian acts, but she’s a proven talent, one who deserves a higher international profile. Anniversary consists of 11 poetic folk-country meditations on love. However, anyone seeking musical representations of euphoria, joy and lust should look elsewhere for, lovely as it often is, the default setting here is a rich melancholia.The album is co-produced by her countryman Tony Dekker, of Read more ...
theartsdesk
As a human being of immense warmth, humour and erudition, Andrew Davis made it all too easy to forget what towering, incandescent performances he inspired. Now is a good time to recall those properly to mind, to listen to his huge discography, and to assess his proper place among the top conductors – again, as one of such versatility and range that, to adapt what Danny Meyer writes below, he might have been labelled a jack of all trades when he was a master of all.The range of tributes here reminds me both what an extraordinarily fine interpreter of operas he was – respected at Glyndebourne Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It was one of those truly memorable evenings – a Royal Albert Hall concert by a someone with a long career (and record sales of 14 million), a woman I’d been introduced to only a few months earlier when a music-loving friend gifted me a CD. Interestingly, she’d been put on to it by a friend in Europe.So it’s a treat in this cacophonous, unsettling age to have a new album from Loreena McKennitt, a singer-songwriter with her own record label whose numerous honours include two Junos, Canada’s premiere music award, two Grammy nominations, and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society Joseph-Elzéar Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A decade ago Canadian duo Chromeo had their biggest success with the single “Jealous (I Ain’t With It)” and its parent album, White Women. However, it didn’t presage a move into the mainstream.For over 20 years, Chromeo’s wry-sexy, wordy electro-funk has been more hipster than populist. Their magnificent 2009 appearance, endorsing handwashing, on eye-boggling kids TV programme Yo Gabba Gabba sums up their playful ethos (check YouTube!). Then again, the same could said of their more recent COVID-era Quarantine Casanova EP. They were into all that Random Access Memories schtick before Daft Punk Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If a week is a long time in politics, what price 44 years? And 3500 miles? Turns out, not much, as Michael Healey’s sparkling play, 1979, proves that events all that time ago and all that way across the Atlantic maintain a remarkable relevance today.We open on a besieged prime minister, Joe Clark, being harangued by his finance minister, John Crosbie, who has Malcolm Tucker’s lexicon on his lips and a budget to force through a hung Parliament. Lose the vote and Clark’s fragile minority government will fall; postpone the vote and his credibility (not least in his own mind) will plummet; win Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Myriam Gendron's debut album Not So Deep As A Well was originally released in 2014 by Feeding Tube, a US label run by the prominent music writer Byron Coley. When it came out, he wrote that she was a “wonderful if spectral guitarist and singer, whose signature sound was as light as it was intoxicating. This album glows with holism and is one of the most beautiful evocations of times past and present and future you will hear this year.”Coley found out about Canada's Gendron when she played a concert dedicated to the songs of Michael Hurley, the Greenwich Village-associated singer-songwriter Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The realisation that Shirley Hurt is the name assumed by Canada’s Sophia Ruby Katz for recording helps explain why her debut album is so oblique. As well as the cloaked identity, what seem initially to be direct songs cleaving to familiar musical forms have winding structures which don’t end up where they seem to be heading. Similarly, the lyrics are tough to parse.Take “Problem Child.” Beginning in a vaguely Rickie Lee Jones manner, its jazzy undertone is bolstered by minimal, shuffling drums. Then, there’s some equally muted and unexpected “Do you Know the Way to San Jose” trumpet-like Read more ...