London
Thomas H. Green
As a live sensation, Fat Dog have been the talk of the year. The London five-piece offer a dementedly energized night out. Performative concerts, tight as zip-wire but hedonistic and loose round the edges. They’ve developed a solid rep for sending audiences nuts. Consequently, there’s a hungry new fan-base salivating for their debut album, WOOF. Coming in at just over half-an-hour, it captures their battering zing; short, sharp and ballistic.Fat Dog’s sound is rooted in proto-techno crunch akin to the movement once known as Electronic Body Music, which is to say bands such as Front 242, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London; in my street, for many years, a pair of trainers were up in the sky, hanging over the telephone wires. They were there for years, getting more and more soggy, more and more decayed. Urban myth called them a tribute to a dead gangster.There are similar urban legends aplenty in Tife Kusoro’s 75-minute new play, G, which won the George Devine Award last year, and now gets its premiere in the upstairs studio at the Royal Court. Its bare traverse staging features a pair of luminous white trainers hanging above the action. But, unlike the ones in my street, these Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Conducting a piano concerto and playing a piano concerto are normally two separate jobs. Not at last night’s Prom, where Lahav Shani did both – and not just in a breezy Mozart concerto, but the beast that is Prokofiev’s Third. It was quite the feat, like climbing Mount Everest carrying not just your own supplies, but everyone else’s too. I hope he was on at least time-and-a-half.Of course, it’s not just a question of doing it at all: it’s only worth it if it’s done well, and it was. Shani (pictured below), who also conducted the rest of the programme (with the Rotterdam Philharmonic) in more Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Pete Waterman, responsible (some might prefer the word guilty) for more than 100 Top 40 hits, said that a pop song is the hardest thing to write. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back – all wrapped up in three minutes. Benedict Lombe’s Shifters takes longer – 33 Kylies longer – but it pulls off the same devilishly difficult trick and, as with the best earworms of the 1980s, it’s likely to stay in your head for years. Dre(am) is at his Nana’s wake when, late and unannounced, Des(tiny) is suddenly in the room, the impact of her arrival akin to his being hit in Read more ...
mark.kidel
Jon Hopkins is on a journey, and we’re fortunate that he feels he can share the trip with us. His latest offering takes the listener beyond the paths opened up in Singularity (2018) and Music for Psychedelic Therapy (2021).There's a coherence in the new album that builds on the explorations of the previous two. A reflection, no doubt, of the clarity he's feeling inside, an increased mastery of the electronic and acoustic means (from synths to strings) at his disposal and brought to the studio by his gifted collaborators, including regulars such as Leo Abrahams (guitar) and Cherif Hashizume ( Read more ...
David Kettle
REVENGE: After the Levoyah, Summerhall ★★★★★ The Jews have had enough. After decades – centuries, in fact – of suspicion, name-calling, finger-pointing and violent persecution, they can’t even leave their Gants Hill or Barkingside flats, where London smears into Essex, any more. In 2019, though, things have really come to a head thanks to one figure: Jeremy Corbyn. Something needs to be done.Step in twins Dan and Lauren, plus dodgy ex-gangster Malcolm Spivak, who steals the show with his wide-boy pronouncements at their granddad’s funeral. Have the unlikely siblings got the balls to act Read more ...
Gary Naylor
On opening night, there’s always a little tension in the air. Tech rehearsals and previews can only go so far – this is the moment when an audience, some wielding pens like scalpels, sit in judgement. Having attended thousands on the critics’ side of the fourth wall, I can tell you that there’s plenty of crackling expectation and a touch of fear in the stalls, too. None more so than when the show is billed as a new musical.By the interval (much before that if it’s a hit), you’re locating the production on a multi-dimensional spectrum, assessing its component parts (acting, plot, design), its Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At one point, in John Fowles’s 1977 novel The Magus, the guru character in the story compares sexuality before and after the 1960s. He says that although “young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not”, there is also a loss – “a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion”.Sexual restraint has its own tender feelings. It is this emotional landscape that lies at the heart of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s debut play, Peanut Butter & Blueberries, at the Kiln Theatre. It’s a contemporary Muslim love story in which the two lovers never even touch each other.Set in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Two boys in east London, one Black, one white, grow up together, play pranks at school, then decades later have a tempestuous falling out. That’s the main narrative arc of these twin plays, but it accounts for none of their extraordinary richness and the superlative acting they entail. These are monologues, a genre where dramatic excellence is primed to go right off the scale: think the powerful solos of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, the haunted storytellers of Conor McPherson’s plays, Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall. Recast after their runs at the Dorfman, the trio of plays is directed by Clint Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This Prom by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Nil Venditti featured a first half of Welsh composers, including the belated Proms debut of Karl Jenkins at the age of 80. It’s a sign of how Proms programming has evolved over the last 30 years that either of them gets a look-in and, even if I had some mixed feelings about their pieces, it can only be a good thing that they are now being heard in this festival.The second half featured someone who has waited even longer than Jenkins for a first Proms outing – Louise Farrenc, who died in 1875 – alongside a guy called Ludwig van Beethoven, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This was my first Prom of the season – always an exciting moment, even in my fourth decade as an attendee. I was hearing the BBC Philharmonic under its newly appointed Principal Guest Conductor, the excellent Anja Bihlmaier, in a programme of two giants of the 19th century Romantic repertoire separated by warp & weft by the American composer Sarah Gibson.This was not the originally billed commission beyond the beyond, as Gibson died of cancer at the age of 38 on 14 July, with the new piece unfinished. It was replaced by warp & weft (2021), based, according to the programme note, on Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If I were a rich man, I'd be inclined to put together a touring production of Fiddler on the Roof and send it around the world, a week here, a week there, to educate and entertain. But, like Tevye, I also have to sell a little milk to put food on the table, so I’ll just revel in the delights of this marvellous show in the theatrical village nestling within Regent’s Park.The book (by Joseph Stein based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem) pulls off one of great art’s essential tricks - it finds the universal in the specific. That’s why it ran for 3000+ performances on Broadway Read more ...