New York
Markie Robson-Scott
When you’re next strolling through Washington Square Park, or SoHo, or the West Village, you can thank Jane Jacobs that those New York neighbourhoods have survived (though she'd blanch at the price of real estate). Four-lane highways almost dissected and ruined them in the mid-Fifties, but her grass-roots activism saved those higgledy-piggledy streets. This film has some great archival footage that brings those days to life, though it could have done with fewer talking heads and more detailed interpretation.Vanity Fair writer and director Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Production gloss and deliberation are not notions immediately springing to mind while pondering the 1976-era Ramones. Even so, this new edition of their second album, the ever-wonderful Leave Home, reveals that careful consideration was given to how they presented themselves on record.Leave Home demonstrated the Ramones more-than had the goods to build on the promise of their era-defining debut, and little needs saying about the album itself. It steps beyond punk and is a rock classic. The meat of this new reissue is unfamiliar though: fifteen never-before-heard in-progress tracks – the whole Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
First introduced into the burgeoning “Marvel Cinematic Universe” in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland’s incarnation of Spider-Man is another triumph for this exuberant franchise (even if some might feel a pang for the fine and still-recent pairing of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone under director Marc Webb's helmsmanship). What the Marvel flicks have got, and their DC Comics rivals conspicuously haven’t, is a capacity for bringing some wit and a lightness of touch to their stories, no matter how much computerised spectacle is exploding all around.Holland, previously on the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Opera-lovers coming to St Martin's Lane may feel confused to be confronted by an unrecognisable Coliseum, which now has huge girder-like structures adorning the stage and ceiling and a rather ugly skyscraper looming out of the wings, called Falco Tower. Happily, the producers had left a copy of the bogus newspaper, The Obsidian Times, on every seat, which offered some handy background about the plot of Bat Out of Hell - the Musical.Obsidian (a bleak anti-Manhattan) is falling into slum-infested wrack and ruin under the despotic leadership of Falco, the Commander-in-Chief. However, his wife Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You’re like a drowning man trying to wave at an ocean liner,” says lawyer Philip (Michael Sheen) to his uncle Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere as you’ve never seen him before – a revelation). “But I’m a good swimmer,” replies Norman, feverishly making notes on a napkin. Swimming, for Norman, means trying to network his way around New York City’s biggest Jewish names and make a deal. He’s a wannabe macher, a connector, always on the periphery, always on the verge of catastrophe. The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer is the film’s subtitle – a bit of a give-away.From the first Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Forty years after Annie swept on to Broadway, brimming with shining-faced optimism amidst wearying times, along comes Nikolai Foster's West End revival of the show to do much the same today. A tentative-seeming Miranda Hart may be the name player, making her musical theatre debut in the role created by Broadway legend Dorothy Loudon. But the heart and soul of the production belong to its pint-sized ensemble, not least (at the performance I caught) a 12-year-old newcomer called Ruby Stokes, whose unforced delivery of the title role really does make one hopeful about, as the song lyric so Read more ...
David Benedict
On 8 April 1952, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green were chatting to Charlie Chaplin at a party when he started raving about a picture he’d seen the previous night at Sam Goldwyn’s house. It was called Singin’ in the Rain – had they heard of it? “Heard of it? We wrote it!” But then, this dynamic duo had form: five years earlier they wrote On the Town. But if you’ve only ever seen that prototype sailor-on-shore-leave movie, you’ll have missed the thing from their original stage version that catapulted Comden & Green to showbiz fame: the dynamite score they wrote with their Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Catfights can be entertaining, till the blood starts to flow – or, as in Onur Tukel’s brutal social comedy, you take turns putting your opponent in a coma. During three increasingly ritualised donnybrooks, Anne Heche and Sandra Oh batter past the title’s fetishising of female fights. In a way unlike any other film I’ve seen, they also lose the requirement to be likeable which can make standard female characters so insipid. As they pummel each other to the ground, they’re finally saying what they really think.Writer-director Tukel sets up former college friends Ashley (Heche) and Veronica (Oh Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Duncan Macmillan has had a good couple of years. In 2015, his play People, Places and Things was a big hit at the National Theatre, winning awards and transferring to the West End. His other plays, often produced by new-writing company Paines Plough, have been regular fixtures at the Edinburgh Festival, while his co-adaptation (with director Robert Icke) of George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four has been constantly revived in the West End. Now he tackles novelist Paul Auster’s masterpiece in a show that is visually intensive, as well as intellectually satisfying. City of Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams, greatest communicator among living front-rank composers, zoomed into the follow-spot for the second and third concerts of the New York Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency. Harmonielehre, his first epic symphony in all but name, and The Chairman Dances, preliminary study for the nostalgic-cum-violent foxtrot of the Maos in Act Three of Nixon in China, are already repertoire staples, while Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra is about to become one; this was its third performance in London since 2013. Even so, the spotlighting was bold for a high-profile tour, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard, Halley Feiffer has written a right curmudgeon of a central role. David is a successful playwright, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has no difficulty slotting himself directly into the great American drama tradition. He’s also such a testy individual that even being in the same room as him for very long is an endurance. This being theatre, it’s a test we have elected to take, and the result has much of the fascination of an ongoing car crash.Adrian Lukis gives a compelling, bravura performance as a character who is not easy to like, but whose flexing, energetic Read more ...
Russ Coffey
There was a time, a decade or so ago, when US indie bands would adopt such idiosyncratic names it almost felt like a ploy to stop them selling out. No band epitomised this trend more than Brooklyn's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. But whilst CYHSY managed to avoid crossing over into the mainstream, their self-released debut did become a cult hit. A biggish one. Big enough cast a shadow over the band's career. And 12 years on, fans are still asking whether they can escape it.The Tourist certainly makes a good fist of gently moving things on. More impressively it does so whilst Read more ...