sun 08/06/2025

Chicago

Bad Teacher

As if the education profession wasn't beleaguered enough at present in America, along comes Bad Teacher, the Cameron Diaz vehicle dedicated to the proposition that the only sector of society more deserving of contempt than students is filmgoers....

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RIP house music singer Darryl Pandy

A still from the 'Love Can't Turn Around' video

The house music of Chicago, led by producers and DJs, has long had a tendency to feature the greatest vocals of any genre yet not make stars of its singers. And for most of his working life, Darryl Pandy, who died yesterday aged 48, was not the star...

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Disappears, The Borderline

Disappears: White-light intensity from Chicago

Sometimes you stare at live bands and question why they bother. It’s a pact - the band plays, the audience looks on and claps. Last night’s debut British show by Chicago's Disappears raised that question. The night before, they’d played Amsterdam’s...

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Thrill Me, Tristan Bates Theatre

Does the perfect murder make for the perfect musical? One doesn't have to make undue claims for the work's chamber-size appeal to warm to Thrill Me, the American two-hander that has arrived at the Tristan Bates Theatre as this season's entry in...

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DVD: City Girl (1930)

Pump and thrust of a Chicago diner: Mary Duncan (left) is the gorgeous girl in 'City Girl'

I’ll confess it straightaway: I’m biased about this picture (as it surely would have been known in 1930) – wholly, shoutily in favour of it. I watched it last September at the Cambridge Film Festival on a big screen in Emmanuel College, with two...

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Ross Kemp: Extreme World, Sky 1

Ross Kemp in a 'chop house' where women cut heroin naked so they can't stash the drug about their person

Ross Kemp won a Bafta for his documentary about being on the frontline in Afghanistan, so perhaps I should begin by saying all due respect, and all that, but how much can you ratchet up the hardman image before it threatens to dissolve into self-...

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Horizon: What is Reality?, BBC Two

Quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger gets his photons in a twist in the Double-slit experiment

Horizon took a funny turn this week. The new series started off gently enough – there was a nostalgic look back at 60 years of science on the box, then an exploration as to what makes us clever (the fun this entailed when vaguely well-known people...

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Wilco, Royal Festival Hall

Rock music doesn’t get much better than this. For two hours, the raggedy Chicago band Wilco poured out song after song from a repertoire that stretches back 15 years, slipping effortlessly between gentle alt-country and avant-garde rock, between the...

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theartsdesk MOT: Chicago, Cambridge Theatre

Chicago, in some ways, remains the great musical theatre surprise success of modern times. Bob Fosse's dissection of sex and violence in the Windy City had a respectable Broadway run back in the 1970s (898 performances in all), featuring a...

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theartsdesk in Chicago: Radical Invention in the Windy/Second City

A fresh look at Matisse: 'Bathers by a River', 1916-17

On my previous trip to the Second City in 2009, the much-awaited Art Institute of Chicago extension wasn’t quite ready for visitors, but is now about to celebrate its first birthday, and it’s a treat. The Modern Wing adds 35 per cent more space to...

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Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Scala London

Concentrated bursts of power from Chicago: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

It’s my habit as a music critic to take notes at shows such as this: nothing extensive, just words and phrases jotted down to jog the memory when it comes to writing the thing up afterwards. Looking back at my scraps of paper for this, the London...

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Haitink, Chicago SO, Royal Festival Hall

Bernard Haitink: a safe pair of hands

The Bruckner half of the programme appeared to have come early as Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony sternly, doggedly, processed through the introduction of Haydn’s Symphony No.101 ‘Clock’. It was a portent of things to come. The prognosis...

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