Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
David McVicar's revival production of Handel's oratorio-cum-opera Semele isn't terribly clever or beautiful or impressive, or fecund with ideas or detail or emotion. But it does work. It does tell the story. And what brings colour to its initially rather pasty, unappealing face, and fire and heft to its anaemic belly, is sex and - best of all for those of you who will only be able to catch it in concert at the Barbican next week - one of the most impressive Handel casts I've heard for years.Appropriately for a production as deliberately confused in concept as this one - where the characters Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Spain and Venezuela are two countries divided by a common language - in dance and music, as well as in culture. Hence the hook for Paco Peña’s latest production, Flamenco sin fronteras, which while wearing a faintly anthropological air also packs a lot of ebullient performance skills and talking-points. Contrasting “high” Cordoban flamenco (and in Charo Espino and Angel Muñoz, Peña provides two of the most refined dancers to be found in any style) with gutsy, African-influenced flamenco from Caracas, makes for a direct comparison of sex and allure, earth and fire, of relaxed, open-hipped, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It occurred to me halfway through Reunited that you could map the characters of This Life – the epochal house-share drama of the Nineties – on to those featured in Mike Bullen’s one-hour pilot feature and see little change in the terrain. All the tropes of modernity 2010-style – Google, Facebook, iPhones – were trotted into shot, but the premise was a dated one, while some of the supposedly edgy, zeitgeisty signifiers – white-painted bare walls, winking references to cocaine – were way off the pace. At least they didn't play any Portishead.Six former tenants of “a shared house in Stokey [ Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Oh, how we like to moan when the inevitably grubby world of Hollywood gets its mitts on one or another European "classic". The Birdcage, we're told, wasn't as good as La Cage aux Folles (actually, I preferred it), and the 2001 Tom Cruise vehicle, Vanilla Sky, isn't a patch on its 1997 Spanish forebear, Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes): I'm with the nay-sayers on that. Now comes the French popular success, Heartbreaker, starring Vanessa Paradis as an ice queen who melts in the hands of a bodyguard who is not in fact what he seems, and word has it that Universal Pictures and Working Title have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The part played by Polish fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain has hardly gone undocumented, and the Hun-zapping exploits of the Polish 303 Squadron will be familiar to anyone with a historical interest in the subject, so you’d have to say that calling this film The Untold Battle of Britain was a wee bit of an exaggeration. Guy Hamilton’s 1969 Battle of Britain movie must be due for its umpteenth TV airing soon, and does of course feature the RAF’s Polish contingent, depicted as itching to get into action but being held back by grouchy group captains and sarcastic squadron leaders. Read more ...
David Nice
I'll admit that many of us were spoiled by the last revival of Boccanegra at Covent Garden - also of Verdi's most often heard and masterly revision, like the current staging, but using Ian Judge's production of the original version - boasting a near-perfect quartet of principals who all meshed with each other. The only survivor from that team to be seen in the latest showing is Ferrucio Furlanetto (pictured with Domingo above), whose Prologue aria as the vengeful father of Boccanegra's ill-fated love was cheered to the rafters then but barely made an impact this time, oddly over-acted and Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Looked at from a certain angle, Michael McDonald, who supported Al Green at the O2 on Sunday, couldn't be cooler. A key part of Steely Dan's notoriously virtuosic circle of session musicians, the man who turned the Doobie Brothers from hoary rockers to sophisticated R&B hit machine, and latterly the business partner of The Dude himself, Jeff Bridges – the Missouri-born McDonald epitomises a certain kind of laid-back but massively aspirational attitude. It's the attitude associated very much with 1980s Hollywood and mountains of cocaine, and is summed up in the phrase often used to Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On the face of it, comparisons could be drawn between Dawn Kinnard and fellow preacher’s-offspring-cum-country-singer, Diane Birch. Except Birch’s music comes from every musical advantage, whereas Kinnard still has a day-job as a hairdresser. Moreover, her voice remains totally unproduced - a glorious mix of Tom Waits and Marge Simpson. This summer, for the second time in three years, she has put her savings on the line to try to make it here. Last time round, Kinnard, then staying chez Cerys Matthews, enjoyed a barnstorming session on Later with Jools Holland. Last night things Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the Danny Sugerman-Jerry Hopkins biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, that kicked off the Doors death cult 30 years ago, at a point where the band's reputation was wallowing low in the water. Previously it had been quite acceptable to regard much of their work as cheesy pseudo-jazz with stupid lyrics, and their posturing vocalist Jim Morrison as a tedious drunk with a Narcissus complex.Then suddenly The Doors were propelled into Classic Rock nirvana, their collective efforts elevated to "Great American Band" status and Jim Morrison canonised as sage, seer and sex god. There they Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you happen to be in Trafalgar Square in London any time soon, you should take a close look at the friezes that adorn the ground portion of Nelson’s Column. For there you will find, most unexpectedly, that one of the sailors depicted is a black man, one of 1,400 non-British seamen among the 18,000 who took part in the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October, 1805.That striking factoid comes from The Untold Battle of Trafalgar, the first in a four-part season, Bloody Foreigners on Channel 4, which aims to show how foreigners were at the heart of some of Britain’s most important historic events. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It doesn’t often happen that a new sitcom is born perfectly formed. The Royle Family, it was instantly clear, would do no wrong. And there was nothing much the matter with those things by Ricky Gervais. (I'd also make a case for The IT Crowd.) But maybe Rev has a harder trick to pull off. Unlike comedies which achieve their effects by formal daring, Rev operates within narrower strictures. It is in all essential respects a deeply traditional sitcom. It’s about a vicar, for goodness’ sake, who since Moses came down from the mountain has been more or less the ideal sitcom protagonist, being Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Last week I watched a tiny tot being photographed by her father, on a beach in southern Turkey. There was no girlish giggling or splashing about in the sea; rather than a show of carefree happiness, she delivered a studied pose. She assumed an expression of supreme indifference and, with hand on hip and weight on one leg, twisted her body into a seductive coil. The four-year-old was imitating a supermodel! I didn’t see the pictures, of course, but I would still classify this kind of premature sexualisation as child pornography.The American photographer, Sally Mann was accused of kiddy porn in Read more ...