Reviews
peter.quinn
Another sold-out gig, another standing ovation, another memorable night. A sprightly 89 years old, the vocal pipes may not be quite so silky, but on the first of a three-night run at Ronnie Scott's, Jon Hendricks – dubbed the “James Joyce of jive” by Time magazine - still had the chops to show why he's considered one of the most original and influential singers in jazz.Actually, to call this a gig sells the evening short by a country mile. Accompanied by a trio of vocalists - his daughters Aria and Michele, plus Kevin Fitzgerald Burke - this show was part family “git-together”, part Read more ...
David Nice
In the event, Covent Garden's first glitzy star vehicle of the current season turned out to be a handsome ensemble piece, with three of the four leads bringing special gifts (though not quite the full picture) to their stagey roles, tender and nuanced yet less than ideally pacy conducting from Mark Elder and about as much interpretation and telling mise-en-scènes from director David McVicar as the piece can reasonably take.Fans of tenor Jonas Kaufmann, and they are growing with good reason by the day, will no doubt tell you that he stole the show. Not exactly. His character, Maurizio, Count Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“How many derelict gasworks can you shoot?” director Patrick Keiller asked almost in despair, at an early screening of his third psychogeographic amble through Britain. Not too many more may be the answer, as Robinson in Ruins significantly misses the mark set by its predecessors, the wonderful London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997). This long look at the landscapes of Oxfordshire and Berkshire does still find sharp moments of beauty and oppression in England’s rolling hills.Keiller’s original conceit had Robinson, a fictional, shifty type, wandering obsessively through first London then Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If only such a bubble of foolish hype did not follow Wayne McGregor wherever he goes, such bloated talk of reinventing dance, injecting it with brains, and infusing it with new chemical sensitivities and practically supernatural powers, one would be able to look at what his contribution to theatre is more clearly. He is not the Heston Blumenthal of dance. Primarily McGregor can be thanked for bringing some ravishing and expensive lighting design to dance, under which his insectoid dancers twitch and scurry like moths and crane flies attracted to the flame. FAR, his new work premiered Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just about the time you're losing patience with the Young Vic revival of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie - wondering at some of the variable accents and directorial overembellishments and the heavy sledding accompanying this most fragile and beautiful of plays - along comes one of the great, prolonged encounters of all 20th-century drama: that between an emotionally indrawn, "crippled" (in more ways than one) young woman and the scarcely less damaged swain who all too briefly offers salvation in a natty suit. And suddenly, as another character in a later Williams play would go on to Read more ...
david.cheal
When Mavis Staples opens her mouth, remarkable things happen. She hollers, she sobs, she moans, she swoops, she rasps, she croons, she shudders. Not since I last saw Al Green have I seen such a bravura display of vocal prowess. On a rainy night in London, the 71-year-old singer of gospel, soul and R&B was in town for a one-off gig (and also for a Jools Holland appearance) to promote her new album, You Are Not Alone.With a three-piece band – guitar, bass, drums – and three backing singers, among them her sister Yvonne Staples, she banished the cold and the wet with a set that radiated Read more ...
sue.steward
On-screen kissing rarely works; even the sexiest, most practised Hollywood couples usually can’t manage it. But when the eponymous Chico and Rita turn to each other against smoochy strains of “Besame Mucho” and their lips touch for the first time, it looks - and feels - like the real thing. Even though the couple were conceived with pencil on paper and born into a digital world, their kiss actually feels erotic. Animation never was my favourite medium, but within minutes of the start of Chico and Rita, I was hooked.The Spanish directors of this sensational film are three multimedia film- Read more ...
marcus.odair
It's now over 20 years since saxophonist Jason Yarde emerged, aged just 16, with pioneering London collective The Jazz Warriors. Since then he has played with big hitters like McCoy Tyner, Hugh Masekela and Roy Ayers, as well as a younger generation including Gwilym Simcock and Soweto Kinch. Yet he's more than an in-demand sideman, having also established himself as a composer and arranger in his own right through work for the LSO and BBC Concert Orchestra.
Both sides of that personality were evident at Chelsea’s sober 606 Club for this London Jazz Festival show, Yarde’s first appearance at Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For me there is a trinity of black musicians, visionaries who reshaped music in the last half-century: James Brown, Miles Davis and Fela Kuti. And just as it’s hard to imagine a biographical musical of James Brown or Miles Davis coming off - because which mere actor is ever going to have their charisma, attitude or moves - likewise it seemed a stretch to imagine Fela! being much more than sophisticated karaoke. Karaoke with a message and some groovy dancing, no doubt. But somehow this production pulled off the impossible. Near as dammit anyway.One immediate plus of the show, transferring from Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When The L Word, an American drama series following the interconnected lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles, first aired in 2004, much of the acres of coverage it attracted made disbelieving mention of the cast members’ attractiveness, which is an implicit suggestion that lesbians are more usually at the back of the queue when good looks are being given out. Rather irritatingly, Lip Service, a drama series following the interconnected lives etc etc... in Glasgow, and which was immediately dubbed "the British L Word", garnered some of the same responses when it first aired last month. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Adrift (A Deriva), Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia’s third feature film, is a sensuous coming-of-age story as well as an ode to the Brazilian beach landscape of Buzios and the band of gorgeous bikini-clad teenagers who run wild in it. Although Dhalia says the film is not strictly autobiographical, he concedes that it partly mirrors his own childhood beach holidays near Recife and his parents’ divorce when he was 10.The family in Adrift - which is set in the 1980s (you can tell because a typewriter features heavily and there are no iPods or mobiles) - seems idyllically happy at first Read more ...
josh.spero
If you found yourself thinking that you were watching Mission: Impossible rather than Imagine, you could have been forgiven. Alan Yentob had clearly been banned from meeting Ai Weiwei in China, and so one of their interviews was conducted over a webcam, with Yentob sitting in the dark, like some spymaster of the arts.This was even before Ai had been put under house arrest to prevent him from attending a party he arranged to celebrate the demolition of his studio in Shanghai (a studio which the Chinese Government had asked him to put up in the first place...). All of which prompts the question Read more ...