New York
Matt Wolf
The play that lost the 2011 Tony Award to War Horse is now receiving its British debut at the very address where War Horse premiered. But such theatrical coincidences won't register in most circles as much as a title, The Motherf**ker with the Hat, that sent newspaper copy desks into a tailspin (the New York Times didn't print the M word at all, even with the asterisks). Such hoo-ha, one feels, makes a certain kind of sense given the perpetual tailspin in which the characters in Stephen Adly Guirgis's high-octane theatrical universe exist.If that primal energy seems a tad muted on this Read more ...
joe.muggs
The story of singer-songwriter-cellist-composer Arthur Russell is tragic and life-affirming in equal measure. A Zelig-like figure, from his corn-belt beginnings he glided through underground scenes in the 1970s and '80s, collaborating with everyone from Alan Ginsberg to Talking Heads to Philip Glass. Though he died aged just 40 in 1992, he directly inspired everyone from the early pioneers of house music to current luminaries like Sufjan Stevens and Hot Chip.When I interviewed his biographer Tim Lawrence for theartsdesk in 2009 it was clear that interest in Russell's work was continuing to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Artists can be selfish bastards. Yoko Ono didn’t pay her babysitters; Bob Dylan has frozen out nearly all his friends; Norman Mailer stabbed his wife, and William Burroughs shot his. Philp (Jason Schwartzman), the young novelist who sociopathically meanders through Alex Ross Perry’s new film, causes no fatalities. Which is where his positive qualities peter out. Whether contemplating his navel to Ph.D level, or harbouring petty grudges and explosive rages which would shame a two-year-old, Philip may be cinema’s most rampantly temperamental artist.Perry had Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
More than an hour and a half, and not a moment too long: this moving and enlightening visual essay was a near-perfect example of broad brush modern history, enlivened by telling detail. It was a curiously intense history, written and narrated by a leading historian of the world wars of the 20th century, Professor David Reynolds, and predicated on the telling assumption that politics may be personal, and the personal may be political. The underlying motif was the personality, in terms of physical health and psychological complexity, of that skilled and idealistic politician Read more ...
David Nice
Few conductors would think of putting Bernstein’s comic-sexy Fancy Free ballet and the orgasmatron of Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy together in a concert's second half. In fact I’ll wager, without research, that it’s never been done before. Yet as Music Director of the Royal Opera, Antonio Pappano has proved himself style-sensitive in everything from Mozart to Turnage – even Wagner, though that took time – and so he proved in bringing his orchestra onstage for their first, long-overdue mixed-programme concert together here.It will now be an annual event, Pappano told us before the music Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Composer Tansy Davies and librettist Nick Drake’s opera Between Worlds cannot help but be a devastating tribute to the tragedy of 9/11. Yet the whole is peppered with problems that mean this result is achieved only intermittently. Davies – whose first opera this is – and the playwright Drake, with Deborah Warner directing, have picked a topic that would seem at first glance to demand the scale of a modern-day Götterdämmerung. The result they extrapolate is far from that – but when it does succeed, it is in ways that are not really about 9/11 at all.This is, essentially, the final section, in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group inspired Candace Bushnell to write Sex and the City, a connection highlighted on this DVD of Sidney Lumet’s 1966 adaptation. Only the breezy style of the newsletter which keeps eight female friends from Vassar’s Class of ‘33 in touch bears real comparison. This is a broader saga about women’s experiences and ambitions in the years up to World War Two. It’s also an unexpected entry in Lumet’s great series of New York films, as these Manhattan wives, daughters, doctors and socialites grip as strongly as his more familiar male cops and lawyers, moving to the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
On a snowy day in early spring in New York, the On Kawara – Silence show at the Guggenheim is unlikely to warm you up. His date paintings, postcards, telegrams and other coldly ur-conceptual accountings spiral up those famous white Frank Lloyd Wright stairs, seemingly ad infinitum. But it’s a powerful, hypnotic experience, one that seeps into your subconscious and becomes a meditation on time and space.On Kawara, who died last year in New York at the age of 81, almost never gave interviews or let himself be photographed. You won’t find him on YouTube, though you will find footage of people Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Joshua Harmon’s provocative 2012 piece is the Rocky of comedies. His evenly matched sparring partners, a pair of viscerally antagonistic cousins confined in close quarters after a familial loss, bruise, bludgeon and literally draw blood. The bonds of kinship have never felt so tangible, so knotty, so inescapable.Daphna (Jenna Augen) is aggressively committed to her Jewish heritage and lifestyle, while atheistic Liam (Ilan Goodman) all but disowns it, missing their grandfather Poppy’s funeral because he dropped his iPhone from a ski lift while in Aspen with gentile girlfriend Melody (Gina Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone whose attention was caught by Royal Blood’s recent explosion in popularity and who imagines the Brighton duo as rock innovators, with their bass and drum approach, may be surprised to hear that Lightning Bolt have been ploughing that particular furrow since the 1990s. In fact, Fantasy Empire is the Rhode Island band’s sixth album and its first since 2009’s monumental Earthly Delights. The two bands’ chosen instrumentation is their only similarity though. Instead of heavy blues riffs, Lightning Bolt churn out joyous, high-speed noise-rock that frequently suggests twisted, industrial Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
New filmmakers often suffer an unhelpful onslaught of comparisons and labels. Yet Desiree Akhavan offers so many options as to deflect all of them – counter measures against the heat-seeking missiles of media stereotyping. She’s a bisexual, an Iranian-American, a second generation immigrant, a multi-hyphenate (actor-writer-director), a New Yorker with a line in neurotic anal-gazing worthy of Woody Allen, and she’s currently appearing in Girls alongside (and drawing comparisons with) the poster girl for the female zeitgeist, Lena Dunham. There’s so much there that she can only be wholly Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s an engaging, indie sense of emotional flux in writer-director Desiree Akhavan’s feature debut Appropriate Behaviour, and a very funny script indeed behind it. Akhavan herself plays Shirin, daughter of a traditional Iranian-American emigre family, who may define herself as bisexual but whose heart seems to be telling her she’s gay: she’s both distraught and angry after the film’s opening scene break-up with girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson, cooler and much more self-aware).Appropriate Behaviour loops loosely, and without signage, between past scenes from that relationship, from Read more ...