biography
Adam Sweeting
The way the BBC keeps knocking out these little biopics about the lives of various household names (John Lennon, Gracie Fields, Margot Fonteyn etc), you'd think there was nothing simpler than to get inside the mind of some complex public figure, deftly sketching in a bit of socio-historical background on the side with a bit of help from the props and archive department. And, as this low-rent effort to drill into the emotional life of the beloved comic actress Hattie Jacques amply demonstrated, you'd be completely wrong.Throughout most of its 85 minutes I was poised on the edge of my seat, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What's the Greek for "oy"? All the bouzouki dancing and retsina in the world wouldn't be enough to make a satisfying play out of Onassis, Martin Sherman's rewrite of his own Aristo, seen two years ago at Chichester with the same director (long-time Sherman collaborator Nancy Meckler) and absolutely invaluable leading man (Robert Lindsay). The star gives the piece his customary highly theatrical all, in the process making you think perhaps the material really is the stuff of genuine tragedy. But all the high-flown talk of "destiny" and whatnot can't shift what Onassis actually is - less a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Celebrity Autobiography, like most of the world’s best ideas, is simple yet inspired. Eugene Pack’s creation, developed with Dayle Reyfel, was first seen in Los Angeles three years ago, then in New York and other American cities, and was a sellout hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Both creators, along with a bunch of actors and comics, appeared last night to read from various celebrities’ autobiographies. That’s all it is, folks.Except, of course, it isn’t. For Pack, Reyfel and co, reading verbatim from works by, among others, Britney Spears, Eminem, Diana Ross, David Cassidy and Tommy Lee Read more ...
howard.male
If you have fond childhood memories of either the Born Free book or movie, you might want to stay away. From the opening moments of this documentary, the knowledge that lion-loving conservationist George Adamson was fatally shot in the back on a dirt road in Kenya will immediately stop John Barry’s epic and optimistic theme song from swelling to life in your head. But that’s only the beginning of a systematic dismantling of the Born Free myth from a documentary which, ironically, was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joy Adamson’s unexpected bestseller.With the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
He may call it Titting About, but Kevin Eldon’s show, his first as a solo performer (at the grand age of 49), should be made compulsory viewing for young comics. For this is a man who has learned his craft, the value of good writing, of stage presence, of timing and myriad other things while putting together a lengthy CV that includes Nighty Night, I’m Alan Partridge, Fist of Fun and Brass Eye. If you have seen him in any of those, you will know he's a comedic actor of great range and restraint.Kevin Eldon, The Stand ****
Eldon first comes on in the guise of “most promising poet of 1988” Paul Read more ...
howard.male
With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art project” that dot-com pioneer Josh Harris devised back in 1999 (just before Big Brother came on air for the first time) made the world’s most controversial reality TV show look like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, by comparison. American film director Ondi Timoner’s documentary is an unsettling look at Harris’s struggle to find himself which Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Society for Theatre Research’s book of the year award has been won by ballet critic Jann Parry for Different Drummer, her biography of the Royal Ballet choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. The book was chosen this morning in a tight finish at the post above Susie Gilbert’s Opera for Everybody: the Story of English National Opera, Andrew Stott’s The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography by Thomas Postlewait and The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, edited by Richard Dutton (Oxford University Press). Sheila Hancock presented the accolade Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jazz enthusiast Clint Eastwood, who co-produced this film with the BBC's Arena, clearly harbours a particular regard for songwriter, singer, impresario and record company mogul Johnny Mercer. When Eastwood made his film of John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was set in Mercer's home town of Savannah, Georgia and partly shot in Mercer House, built by Johnny's grandfather, the accompanying soundtrack was a newly recorded collection of some of Mercer's most celebrated songs.Happily, where Midnight in the Garden... was, even in the most rose-tinted view, a grotesque Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The spy out in the cold, the alienated Heathcliff of ballet, rough-hewn, moody and a little frightening - this is an image that’s commonly paraded of the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. His ballets stand up that image, staging barely watchable sexual urges (The Judas Tree, My Brother, My Sisters), accusing polite society as a force for evil (Mayerling, Las Hermanas), smashing the porcelain in ballet’s china cupboard. Even his two most popular and conventional achievements, Romeo and Juliet and Manon, take the classical ballet model and shake it hard into a modern world of rebellious sex that Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tim Lawrence is an author and academic, whose musical studies have led him from the dance scene of the 1990s to researching New York's disco scene – his Love Saves the Day was the first and remains the definitive history of the music, history and politics of disco – and then to the singular figure of Arthur Russell. A cellist, singer, songwriter, producer, composer and electronic artist, Russell existed both within and without disco and many other scenes in a period of cultural ferment in New York when many of the sounds that form the fabric of popular culture were being first created.Russell Read more ...