Reviews
Gary Naylor
If the secret of comedy is timing and location, location, location determines a property’s success, then the producers of Here Comes J. Edgar! are batting on a sticky wicket. How can it hit it out of the ball park in a country with no ball parks?Okay, if London’s musical theatre fans can line up for singing cats in Regent’s Park – as they will from next week – will they do the same for a show about the tyrant who ran the FBI as a personal fiefdom from 1935 to 1972, told in the style of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective? A hard sell indeed.But they have showbiz royalty onside. Harry Read more ...
David Nice
You don't have to be mad to enjoy Gerald Barry's methodically berserk approach to Wilde, but your wits might have begun to turn by the interval and you'll question your sanity by the end. Director Jack Furness has extra ideas the composer would surely like - Australia? Kangaroo! - and marshals the carefully choreographed antics of a musically and dramatically spot-on cast, while Douglas Boyd, game to be ritually humiliated, gets select Philharmonia players to pack a punch and even offer an occasional if brief dose of tenderness from the side of a dazzlingly composed stage.This is the equal Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mass shootings and social media combine to fry the humanity of rich New York kid Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) and poor Southern kid Solomon (Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield) in Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut. Co-writing with Ricky Camilleri, he dodges the moralising high ground and experiential dread of previous online and shooter films, preferring to satirise his antiheroes from the inside. The comedy is snarkily black, the ironic vacancy where authentic selves used to be all-consuming, even the title’s comma arching an eyebrow. The honourable intent is to savage gun laws and the attention Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Queerness is subversive – it dissolves gender binaries. You know the kind of thing: male/female, straight/gay, married/single, fixed/fluid. Likewise, queer theatre typically calls into question all the genre norms: comedy/tragedy, naturalism/symbolism, everyday story/tale of horror. In Eleanor Tindall’s haunting play, Tender – which returns to the main stage of the Bush Theatre a couple of years after premiering there in the studio – the usual conventions of both gender and theatre are challenged in a passionate love story. Is it a queer romance? Body horror? Haunted house? Who cares? Not me Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The key track gives the album its title. “Where the Fades Meet” opens with swelling strings, which are swiftly underpinned by groovy, shuffling, percussion. The lyrics are carried by a chorale singing of a “fading signal”, “stillness” and “shadows.” It seems to about what lies in the gaps between the perceivable. The melody has a vaguely eastern Mediterranean lilt. Overall, it leans into evoking an exotica-inclined Rotary Connection – the late-Sixties/early Seventies outfit that was a core influence on acid jazz.“Where the Fades Meet” is the sixth track on the seventh album – there has also Read more ...
David Nice
Noble intentions and two talented true individuals faced a few obstacles in this admirably-planned Prom. Gianandrea Noseda looked set to reduce the Behemoth aspect of Beethoven's Ninth, especially given a phenomenal, fleet approach to its offspring Mahler Two with a youth orchestra in Georgia back in 2019, but Royal Albert Hall acoustics sometimes got in the way (at least from where I was, towards the back of the hall). And while Jessie Montgomery in These Righteous Paths managed to pay homage to the writing of her late mother Robbie McCauley, pioneer of the Black theatre movement, as well as Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Social engineering gets a bad press. The whiff of creating a eugenics-inspired master race by other means clings to it, so too agitprop induced brainwashing, the Republic of Gilead also hoving into view. That’s at the level of a society, but at the personal level, it’s scarcely better received, the thought of tiny protégés being force-fed learning, violin or tennis racquet in hand, both bigger than they are.But I’m here (literally, right here, right now) because of such practices, the son of a panel beater and school dinner lady, who first went to a Russell Group university and later received Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title “Tone Phase 1 for 2 Guitars & 4 Oscillators” is a giveaway, clearly indicating what’s going to be heard once the LP has landed on the record player. And, indeed, the first track on the second side of Eleh’s newly reissued Floating Frequencies / Intuitive Synthesis 1 seamlessly fuses single tones generated by electric guitars and analogue oscillators. However, what’s less apparent from taking in the title is the magnetic power exerted by the track during its translucent progress over ten minutes. Hypnotic.The same applies to what follows: the also-ten-minute “Tone Phase 2 for Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Aaron Copland’s gleaming, monumental Fanfare for the Common Man was written to mark the USA’s entry into World War II. Those thunderous drums and soaring trumpets symbolised the moment when America formally announced itself as the greatest power in the world and its most ardent champion of democracy. How poignant, then, to hear it as a resonant opening to this year’s BBC Proms, in a programme that celebrated America’s 250th anniversary while reminding us that we no longer know what this superpower stands for. Nonetheless, in the moment, the crashing tam-tam and the crescendoing brass provided Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The man who made Interstellar, Tenet and Oppenheimer can hardly be accused of not thinking big. Now, with The Odyssey, he’s thinking epic. Clocking in at a whisker under three hours and peppered with bankable stars, Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s imperishable poem is a bold attempt to recreate the ancient world of the 12th Century BC, with its gods, monsters and all. And it's the first feature film to be shot entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras. Many early reviews have been ecstatic, hailing Nolan’s $250m-worth of movie for its thrillingness, boldness, majesticness and so forth, but Read more ...
Robert Beale
Buxton’s summer jamboree for opera lovers this year offers a brace of baroque works, written 90 years apart, with the character of sorceress as their common feature.Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula was one of the string of Italian operas created by him for London shortly after his arrival in Britain. First seen in 1715, it has four soloists only and the conventional unities of time and place – though early performances were apparently given with spectacular stage effects.The sorceress, Melissa, rules a magic island where two young men and one young woman are her captives. She loves Amadigi, he loves Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Dismemberment is a key motif in the writer-director Simon Stone’s The Oresteia. It reflects the treatment of two of the piece’s several dead bodies, as is hinted at when their killer is asked where he buried them. “Many places,” he replies coolly. And it’s what Stone himself has done with his ancient source material,As the play’s publicity materials announce, it is “after Aeschylus and others”. But the trilogy Aeschylus left us (actually, a tetralogy, according to a programme essay by an eminent classicist: a lost satyr play was the fourth part) is like a rock formation that’s only visible Read more ...