New York
Adam Sweeting
Suddenly everyone is noticing that Richard Gere, now 63, is a much better actor than he used to be in his aloof and self-regarding youth. In Arbitrage, written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki, Gere plays powerful and privileged Manhattan hedge-fund magnate Robert Miller. Since the financial crisis, characters like this are routinely portrayed as surrogate Pol Pots or relatives of Hannibal Lecter, but Gere manages to convey Miller's lust for money and testosterone-drenched sense of entitlement while also suggesting that there's a part of him that is, or at least was, capable of finer feelings Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Even singular sensations grow older - yet A Chorus Line, which coined the phrase, seems ageless, so sure is it of its place in musical theatre history, so locked now into our theatrical consciousness. It is, no question, a wonderful show whose fabric of book (James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante), music (Marvin Hamlisch) and lyrics (Edward Kleban) is seamless and, more importantly, whose vision - as originated by choreographer/director Michael Bennett - has achieved a kind of immortality.Bob Avian, who assisted on the original staging back in 1975, is now the show's guardian and watching this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A Chorus Line is one of the great American musicals. It opened off Broadway in 1975, rapidly barged a path to a larger Broadway house and proceeded to run for over 6,000 performances, breaking records along the way. Chicago, which opened in the same season, failed to seize the city's imagination in the same way, and had to wait till the 1990s to find an audience prepared to devour it. At the Tony Awards the musical about the foot soldiers of showbiz, the faceless dancers high-kicking in line, went on to win nine gongs, and then picked up a Pulitzer Prize. A Chorus Line soon transferred to the Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Towards the end of Tate Modern’s retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein, there is a small abstract painting, Untitled, 1959, executed just before the artist found himself at the heart of the Pop Art movement. The painting is, by any measure, a failure. It is lurid and fussily composed – an ugly streak of red, blue and yellow terminate in a smudge of black. But in it we detect the desire behind Lichtenstein’s innovative aesthetic achievements: it’s too bold and too vibrant.It was in 1961 when Lichtenstein found his signature style of mimicking comic book images. By using a method of painting Read more ...
fisun.guner
It is often argued that Marcel Duchamp is the single most influential artist of the 20th century, and that Fountain, the porcelain urinal he signed R. Mutt and presented to the world in 1917, the single most influential artwork. But that’s not quite the whole picture. Of course, the first half of the century belongs to Picasso, and perhaps to a lesser extent that other goliath of Modernism, Matisse. We would never have had Abstract Expressionism were it not for these two vying giants of European painting. We would never have had the art world’s big leap across the Atlantic from Paris to Read more ...
David Nice
It's odd that Jerry Herman merits only a passing mention in Stephen Sondheim's two-volume autobiographical take on Broadway words and music, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. In a couple of subjects Herman chose no less daringly than the master. Yet while La Cage aux Folles is now so entrenched that we forget its original boldness in asserting a loving gay relationship, Dear World's eccentric mix of eco-plea and nostalgia has yet to be established as a bittersweet chamber piece.Where it only took Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along 11 years to progress from flop to classic, Dear Read more ...
joe.muggs
Feast aims high. Very, very high. Steered by experienced and much-lauded director Rufus Norris, five playwrights and one choreographer seek to make a fusion of physical theatre, dance, onstage music, straight drama, abstract poetic dialogue, projected animation and knockabout comedy to tell no less a story than 350 years of the history of the Yoruba people of west Africa. It spans four continents through recurring manifestations of a group of their “Orishas”, or gods, a series of meals, and an ongoing quest for eggs. Yeah, that old chestnut. It has the potential to be a glorious creation, one Read more ...
howard.male
Reading How Music Works feels a bit like breaking into David Byrne’s house and randomly nosing around the Word files on his computer. First there’s some stuff about whether specific types of music were subconsciously written with certain acoustic spaces in mind, then there’s a biographical bit about Byrne’s experiences as a performer. But just as you’re enjoying becoming immersed in vivid descriptions of what a dump CBGBs was, or the inspiration behind that white suit, the book suddenly makes a sharp, left turn into a potted history of music technology and its influence on what records sound Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1972 John Kander and Fred Ebb were invited by Bob Fosse to a private screening of his film version of their hit stage musical, Cabaret. The movie starred their protégée, Liza Minnelli, who at only 19 had won her first Tony in Kander and Ebb’s first show, Flora the Red Menace, and for whom they would go on to write “New York, New York”. “Liza was our girl, and we cared very deeply about her. We sat there afterwards and didn’t know what to say to these people whom we liked so much. Because we just hated it.”It’s not impossible to see why. When it eventually came in 2002, the movie adaptation Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With a title like this, you know you’re getting something different. Madeleine Olnek’s first feature is a quirky love story set in her native New York, which is portrayed with enchanting zaniness. Where else would you expect the arrival of female space aliens, with bald heads and distinctive collared costumes (to hide their gills, since you ask) to pass unnoticed? Welcome to Olnek’s micro-budget, stylish black-and-white world that revels in its Fifties B movie sci-fi ancestry, complete with juddery spacecraft. Homely Jane works in a stationery store that gives new definitions to banality Read more ...
theartsdesk
10cc: TenologyKieron Tyler10cc occupied a strange place. Balancing cleverness and humour, pop and the musically complex with an archness that was never far, they nonetheless managed to fix themselves, limpet-like, to charts. As this, their first box set, amply makes clear, they were about more than the singles and well-known albums like The Original Soundtrack. The four CDs and DVD reveal 10cc as mad scientists whose inventions were more disciplined than the complex stew of ingredients would suggest.Tenology – geddit: a typically 10cc-ish pun on phrenological head on the cover – Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s rare to get excited about a DVD release. It is even rarer to get excited about a director. Margin Call and its director JC Chandor are rare exceptions. Devised in 2005, the idea for the film came about when the director and his chums, testing the waters of the volatile yet lucrative New York property market, were offered $10m by a bank - few questions asked. By 2006, their plan of buying a building, renovating and flipping it became an undone deal as one of Chandor’s group pushed them to sell up - an act thatproved to be prudent in hindsight.Built upon those real-life tensions, Margin Read more ...