Reviews
Tom Birchenough
In the Globe to Globe season, the Caucasus is proving as fruitful a ground as any for new views on old texts. Georgia’s Marjanishvili company, under director Levan Tsuladze, proved the region has a special style with their version of As You Like It, no less strongly than Armenia’s King John had a couple of days earlier.Tsuladze emphasised the ensemble nature of the action, using a small front stage space, and keeping actors on stage in the wings most of the time. It’s played almost as a play within a play, complete with stage curtain for the court scenes, before we move into the forest, where Read more ...
David Benedict
There comes a point in almost every great soprano’s career when she tells the world that Tosca, the Marschallin or Isolde be damned: what she wanted to sing all along was The Great American Songbook. This announcement tends to be made - how shall I put this? - later rather than sooner. In Jessye Norman’s defence, in 1987, just five years after her landmark, ultra-luscious recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, she recorded a disc of Gershwin, Richard Rodgers et al. Yet since that recording included her terrifying, never-to-be-forgotten cover of Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” ( Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s ironic that Oscar Wilde should escape to the Lake District in 1891 to write a play satirising London society, his first success in the theatre. He took such a shine to the region’s place names that he used them for some of the characters – Berwick, Carlisle, Darlington, Jedburgh. They do seem to lend themselves to titles - we could have had Lady Coniston or Lord Buttermere or Countess Rydal Water. But we got Lady Windermere, which has become part of the language, with that fan, a present from her husband on her 21st birthday, when the play opens.The four-act play is like a Carlton House Read more ...
judith.flanders
Ballo della Regina is a strange piece, for many reasons. A piece of minor Balanchine, it was created late in life for a dancer he clearly admired but who was not core to his vision. Strangest of all, he used music by Verdi, a composer whose music he had only choreographed to in his very early days as a journeyman opera-house ballet-master, when he did not get to choose.So what does the piece tell us? Very little, really. Staged by Merrill Ashley, its original lead, it is efficient, neat, well-rehearsed. And I can see no real purpose to it. The curtain rises on a heart-liftingly familiar Read more ...
bella.todd
The proto version of this tribute show took place at Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2008 on the eve of the 30th anniversary of Sandy Denny’s death. This tour coincides with the release of a new box-set and draws on Thea Gilmore’s courageous recent settings of some of Denny’s rediscovered lyrics. A career-spanning set of covers, it pours water on the embers of a stunning back catalogue as much as it reignites them.Young compere Andrew Batt is clearly a dedicated Denny fan, having himself compiled the 19-CD box set (including 100 previously unreleased tracks). But with his trendily rolled jacket Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The purple cow has taken up its summer residency on the South Bank in London before making the journey to the Edinburgh Fringe in August. As ever, the line-up of performers is extensive: last night comic Tom Allen performed his chat show with the help of a few comedy guests.Allen is a likeable presence on stage and gave the audience 15 minutes of stand-up, with jokes old and new, before he brought on his guests. Walking across the stage, he unwisely tried a rock 'n' roll moment when, Eddie van Halen-like, he thrust a leg on to an onstage amp, before realising the implausibility of such a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This much-rumoured independent movie has been in the works since 2006, and is improbably billed as a Finnish-German-Australian co-production. It's also unusual for being a project that grew out of the online self-supporting film-making community, Wreck-a-Movie.The premise is almost irresistible, and is summed up in the marketing tagline: "In 1945 the Nazis went to the Moon. In 2018 they're coming back." The action commences with the American "Liberty" space mission landing on our nearest galactic neighbour, but it transpires that it's essentially a promotional visit to boost the re-election Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The last night Haitink conducted at the Royal Opera House as musical director the staff wheeled on a moped as a leaving present. Ever since, his conducting has been inextricably linked to that mode of transport in my head. With Haitink, music-making has always seemed to be about getting from A to B in the most dependable, unfussy and often uninspiring way possible. For years, I haven't been able to see the point of him at all. But last night's performance of Bruckner Five with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra made me realise that a straight, uncluttered approach (especially to Bruckner) is Read more ...
David Nice
Glyndebourne nature, it seems, runs along as smoothly as the much discussed new wind turbine on the hill. Within the theatre, though, all is flux: director Melly Still and Vladimir Jurowski, conducting an incandescent London Philharmonic Orchestra, show just how flexible it's possible to be with the viciousness and the vivacity in Janáček's kaleidoscope of birth, copulation, death and a redemption of sorts in celebration of the natural order.What the composer challengingly called "a merry thing with a sad end" is not, as some past productions have played it, an animal fable for children. Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Globe to Globe season has enjoyed tremendous goodwill from audiences and critics alike. And this has been largely repaid, for it’s been a joy and a wonder to learn just how much contemporary relevance can be mined and brought into sharp relief, and with such audacious wit, when stripped of the plays’ native tongue. So one wishes one could keep up the momentum of goodwill for every production.And why not? If one can be convinced by a South Sudanese production of Cymbeline and an Armenian King John (neither plays are highlights of the Shakespearean repertoire, whatever case can be made in Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
One image remains stuck from Watch the Throne's second of five sold-out nights in London; it’s a song-long vision of Kanye West and Jay-Z – aka J Hova or just Hov – sat side by side for Hov’s “Hard Knock Life”. Hov’s words fell out of his mouth seemingly effortlessly as the track's structure emerged while ‘Ye sat in a silent, contemplative stoop - his dripping sweat and jewellery making him look post-marathon mid-set.They’re hip hop’s biggest stars, sure, but here we have two very different entities. For their numerous collaborations – aside from the Watch the Throne album, some of Jay-Z's Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Welsh National Opera has a good track record with Wagner. Its Meistersinger of two summers ago is already the stuff of legend (and alas not likely to return to reality); farther back one recalls a more than respectable Parsifal, a notable Ring cycle, and an old Tristan under Goodall that’s still talked about in hushed whispers.This more recent Tristan, itself almost two decades old, belongs strictly to a new era. Nowadays WNO does original language and books international singers, which in theory – if not always in practice – lifts its productions out of the provincial league. It also has the Read more ...