Reviews
Helen Hawkins
The corset is an unlikely star of the latest Lynn Nottage play to arrive at the Donmar Warehouse, 2003’s Intimate Apparel. After the more male-dominated Sweat and Clyde’s at the same address, this is a personal piece about the lot of Black women, inspired by Nottage’s discovery of an old photo of her great-grandmother Ethel.She set about excavating all she could about Ethel, but there wasn’t much in print about Black women of the time. She knew Ethel was born in Barbados in 1870, arrived, alone, in New York City at 18 and married a man she had corresponded with while he laboured on the Panama Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Many years ago, reviewing pantomime for the first time, I recall looking around in the stalls. My brain was saying, “This is terrible, the jokes are lame, the acting execrable and the set garish.” My eyes were saying, “These kids are loving it, their parents are liking it enough, and the cast are having a great time.” There was joy everywhere in the house, so who was I to play The Grinch?That memory went through my mind standing at the box office 90 minutes before the curtain, surrounded by merch aimed at the coach parties being disgorged outside. An American family from central casting – Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Fans of the character comedian Graham Fellows will possibly turn up for this British film starring the man who created the punk parody single “Jilted John” and Sheffield’s finest, the car-coated singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth. But they may leave disappointed.The action is set in one of the backwaters of rural Britain getting a lot of attention these days; on paper the plot is serviceable. Chicken empire heir Lee Matthews (Ramy Ben Fredj, pictured below, left with Ethaniel Davy) skids on black ice and wipes out a Nativity scene outside his local church but gets the blame pinned on his Read more ...
David Nice
Actually it was a Thursday evening to Saturday experience, but what riches in seven concerts. The only Britten I heard was one of the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid as I approached the Red House on a hot Saturday morning, just too late for that pop-up performance, but in time for Berio. The old guard of composers made a mixed impression, but one of several highlights was to discover how imaginative the new generation is proving in six world premieres.The two biggest contemporary triumphs rested partly in the infinitely adaptable voice of tenor Allan Clayton, one of the four “Festival Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As producer Jerry Bruckheimer cautioned a preview audience, “Remember, this is not a documentary. It’s a movie.” Bruckheimer teamed up with director Joseph Kosinski to make Brad Pitt’s Formula One movie, the same duo who masterminded Top Gun: Maverick. Both films share a kind of dazzling hyper-reality which dares you to try to deny it. You might think “that’s ridiculous, that could never happen,” to which the filmmakers might reply “yes it could, because we just did it.”The F1 paddock and pitlane must have been getting pretty crowded during the making of F1 over the last couple of seasons, Read more ...
mark.kidel
There's something luminous about the Brad Mehldau Trio. The music they create with such joy shines with a special clarity, in which ever-changing forms constantly reveal lines of shared thought, explicitly, yet purveying an abiding sense of wonder. Intellect – and there is plenty of that – is matched here with the fire of inspiration and the thrill of constant surprise.There are so many facets to the lucid dreaming that’s played out by these three exceptional musicians – Felix Moseholm on bass and Jorge Rossy on drums, and the maestro himself. There’s no end to the thrill of intimate Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera can take many forms and fulfil many purposes: this chamber opera by Zakiya Leeming and Sam Redway is about vaccination. Based on history, it has a story to tell and lessons to teach.“A new opera on medicine, memory and innovation” was the subtitle, and that sums up the themes it explores – but the abstractions are brought to life as aspects of the tale of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the early 18th century aristocrat whose experience of a Turkish public bath enabled her to discover and then promote the practice of inoculation (or, to be precise, variolation – introducing infected matter Read more ...
John Carvill
Do we need any more Beatles books? The answer is: that’s the wrong question. What we need is more Beatles books that are worth reading. As the musician and music historian Bob Stanley pointed out, in his 2007 review of Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love, probably the best biography of The Beatles to date, “the subject is pretty much inexhaustible if the writer is good enough.”Gould is more than good enough, and he spent nearly two decades writing his book; whereas Ian Leslie has worked his up from a Covid-era blog post paean to Paul McCartney that went, as they say, viral. Leslie attests to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A Sober Conversation is the work of a master songwriter, one who knows how to achieve their goals. As the album’s nine tracks pour from the speakers, comparisons come to mind: 20/20 and Smiley Smile-era Beach Boys, Lindsey Buckingham, the early solo years of Todd Rundgren.But nothing sounds quite like any of these – spikiness is never far. The initially dreamy opening track “The Tent” is punctuated by squalls of noise. Next, on the sumptuous “Two Legged Dog,” dense, overstated keyboards contrast with the jaunty melody. Part of the point seems to be undermining anything which might lean into Read more ...
David Nice
Aldeburgh offered strong competition for the three evenings of Schubert at the discreetly restored Ragged School Museum, but I knew I had to return for the last event of Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s third festival here, much as I’d love to have heard Allan Clayton in Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers. And if anything, the three-part all-Schubert programme was even more levitational than I’d expected.The circumstances are unique. Kolesnikov and Tsoy welcome you as if into their home to sit in a close semi-circle for wonders in the schoolroom at the top of the building – now more spacious, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I think my problem is that when I should have been listening in school assemblies or RE lessons, I had the Tom Tom Club’s joyous “Wordy Rappinghood” buzzing through my mind. That experience has given me a lifelong aversion to phrases like “The Word was made flesh”, the gospel of St John proving somewhat less than indispensable for me so far. Curiously, that quote, coming very early, marked a high point for two reasons: the novelty of the lip-synch approach had yet to wear off and genuinely interesting insights into the origins, power and unique qualities of speech communication were offered. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To mark this year’s summer solstice, a small audience gathered at London’s newest concert venue, the World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, a small and perfectly formed hall bristling with “state-of-the-art” acoustics and digital facilities. On a balmy midsummer’s evening, the pianist and composer Rieko Makita invited us to reflect on the different moods and aspects of the night, in a programme that combined music with digital art projections.Makita is part of the ever-expanding movement in London to explore technology and new venues as a way of taking classical music to different audiences. For Read more ...