New York
Barney Harsent
You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something. The Seventies – that was when music had real value, when you had an album and it was like a book – something to treasure...” I’m not sure whether it would have been Martin Scorsese or Mick Jagger who said it, but at some point during the supposed 20-year genesis of this New York-based music biz drama, one of them did. Definitely.Vinyl, however, as the show’s near two-hour pilot ably Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was 20 years ago that Mick Jagger suggested to Martin Scorsese that they should make a film "that spanned four decades of the world of music in New York City". The idea has finally come to fruition as Vinyl, HBO's new 10-part series that kicks off on Sky Atlantic on Monday 15 February.The two-hour pilot show is directed by Scorsese and co-written by Terence Winter, who has previously worked with the director on Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street. It's a riotous ride through 1973 New York, a city then awash in debt, crime and sleaze, but also a seething musical melting-pot of punk Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the latter half of the 1980s, Wendy James’s band Transvision Vamp created quite a stir. Their music, including a chart-topping second album, was fizzing, bright-coloured, punky power pop and James was a pouting, hissy-fit of a frontwoman, emanating urgent wannabe-famous sexuality. She disappeared from view in the Nineties, turning up again in the new millennium, first with a band, Racine, and then solo.The second and final Racine album and James’s 2010 solo effort, I Came Here to Blow Minds, boast an unexpectedly effective gnarled, druggy punk. These were followed by a 2012 double A-side Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lion Babe’s lion babe, Jillian Hervey, does, indeed, have a mane to match the title. The daughter of the actor, soul-pop star and dethroned Miss America 1984, Vanessa Williams, she also has a voice that lives up to the moniker, running from the feline to full leonine soul. Lion Babe is not just Hervey, though. Her production partner Lucas Goodman is also on hand to provide the necessary beats, basslines and electronic backing. The New York pairing, who made an appearance on Disclosure's last album, have been much touted as faces for 2016. Their debut album, while not exactly busting open new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although terms like "collateralised debt obligations" and "credit default swaps" were much bandied-about after the banking crash of 2008, they still make sense to almost nobody except bond traders and arbitragers. However, director Adam McKay has come as close as is humanly possible to getting the baffled layman inside the belly of the financial beast in this complex but absorbing movie, and he's done it with wit and flair.The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis's book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a true story of how a handful of maverick investors discerned that the financial Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the more unusual Broadway offerings of recent times crosses the Atlantic with considerable style in an Off West End premiere of 2006 New York entry Grey Gardens that punches well above its weight. As luxuriantly cast as it is elaborately (and carefully) designed, Thom Southerland's loving production honours a peculiar slab of Americana that clearly won't be to all tastes, and some won't see beyond the second-act camp to locate the symbiotic portrait of love and loss that underpins the material.But step back from designer Tom Rogers' cunning scrap heap of a set, and you'll find that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The seemingly eternal British love affair with Guys and Dolls continues apace with the (somewhat recast) transfer to London of the Chichester production from two summers ago, and a more buoyant way to inaugurate the new theatrical year is hard to imagine.Though built for touring, as is evident from the utilitarian feel of Peter McKintosh's fan-shaped design, Gordon Greenberg's staging in an instant brings necessary brio and dash to the West End, supplanting the psychologically anguished "musical fable" that was Gypsy at this same playhouse for most of last year with Frank Loesser and co' Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The proverbial pond that separates the New York and London theatres has had a seismic effect on The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's ironically titled play from 2002 that in every way seems darker, stranger, and more compelling in its British premiere than it did when I first caught it Off Broadway. What previously played as a somewhat wearing Wildean pastiche here assumes creepier colours as a play about two brothers gifted with language who use words in part to forestall the bleakness that lies in wait when things go silent. Simon Evans's production benefits enormously from two of the most Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The New Yorker Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was the classic poor little rich girl: insecure, a woman with scores, perhaps hundreds of lovers, longing for love, the writer of tell-all memoirs. What sets her apart is that she was also the creator of one of the world’s greatest collections of modern and contemporary western art. There are not only her massive donations to a variety of museums, but the legendary Peggy Guggenheim collection in her Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal, one of the most visited modern museums in the world, with some 326 works of art by 100 different artists. La Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A lot of people are going to be enraged, frustrated, or confused by Evening at The Talk House, and in the authorial world of Wallace Shawn, wasn't it ever thus? This is the playwright who gave pride of place to a softly-spoken fascist in Aunt Dan and Lemon and challenged his audience's complacency directly with The Fever, so if I say that his latest play is of a piece with his earlier ones, that is intended as high praise, indeed. From its opening monologue onwards, Talk House could only be the work of this particular writer, Shawn's singularity of vision as undimmed by time (he's now 72) Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This new family musical, based on the popular 2003 Will Ferrell film, has rightly been censured for its extortionate seating prices, hosting the West End’s most expensive top-end tickets at £267.50 a pop – and that’s without the drinks, ice cream and £10 souvenir programme. So, is it worth it?In a word – no. This is a regifted hodgepodge, with Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin’s book brazenly name-checking its sources: Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol, White Christmas. There’s the workaholic who neglects his family and rejects Christmas celebration (Scrooge meets Hook, Mary Poppins et al Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s Patti Smith week. Her second memoir M Train is out. To mark its publication she spoke on Wednesday night at a Guardian event of her love of Morse, Lewis and George Gently. On Thursday she had an appointment with U2 at the O2. Last night (and again tonight) Smith was back at the Roundhouse, where she first performed in the UK in 1976. The question on nobody’s lips was whether, at 68, senior citizenship has remotely withered the savagery of her voice. “We Smiths age well,” she said before she sang a note.On the setlist was a complete performance of Horses, which turns 40 on 10 November, Read more ...