Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Naturally it would be impossible to reach an objective verdict on what is the worst programme ever shown on television, but it is at least safe to say that Popstar To Operastar is determined not to get left behind in the race to the bottom. This could also be said of some of its contestants, whose unfamiliarity with the concept of "singing" seemed surprising in people who perform music for a living, albeit of the non-operatic kind.Not that the concept is necessarily a bad one. The notion of recruiting a bunch of pop singers and bussing them over to the operatic sphere could have been a device Read more ...
graham.rickson
This is a revival of the 1993 production originally directed by Phyllida Lloyd (of Mamma Mia! fame). Directed on this occasion by Peter Relton, it still works brilliantly. Lloyd has updated the setting to 1950s Paris with her young bohemians wearing polo necks, jeans and berets. A gleaming motorbike is one of the objects adorning their living space, its condition degenerating along with the health of Mìmi until it is replaced by a pedal cycle in the final act.As the curtain flies up and the orchestra launches into those upward dotted figures, the artist Marcello is splattering red paint onto Read more ...
james.woodall
'Tis the season to be jolly. Or, if you're a small theatre and choose not to stoop to panto, time perhaps to be a little light, anyway, tickle some tastebuds. Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) is his best-known play, followed by The School for Scandal and The Critic. In his early twenties when he wrote The Rivals (and then, after its first London outing was howled down, rewrote it), Sheridan spawned a skittish, playful, self-consciously silly classic, arch and brilliant.And by jingo, wordy. In Jessica Swale's new production for the Red Handed Theatre Company, at the Southwark Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
Far from being the premature biopic of Frankie Boyle that its title might suggest, Crude is the latest and subtlest in a run of environmentally concerned documentaries. To stand out in this newly lucrative genre, you must adopt an original tack: the celebrity-fronted lecture has been done (An Inconvenient Truth), as too has the thriller (The Cove) and the prankster comedy (the Yes Men films). So anyone for the straight-shooting, no bells-and-whistles approach - “Just the facts, ma’am” as Dragnet’s Joe Friday would have put it?The back-to-basics angle proves surprisingly refreshing in Crude, Read more ...
william.ward
Over the last 20 years or so, the genre of music we have learnt to associate with the violent assault of a regime upon its adversaries is hard rock blared out on massive speakers at ear-splitting volume, 24/7. First tried out with decisive results by the American military on General "Pineapple Face" Noriega of Panama in 1989, it has been refined in recent times to break down the resistance of innumerable presumed jihadis and insurgents in US detention.The juxtaposition between those two dynamic elements contrived by Tom Stoppard and André Previn in 1977 with Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera Elektra is a diabolical piece of work - less an opera than an event determined to cut its mark. A vast orchestra of 112 players unleashes a two-hour tsunami of sound across the stage, on which female voices are buffeted like pieces of driftwood, shrieking of mothers who murder husbands, daughters who want to murder mothers, rivers of blood, flayed horses, dogs, bodies. Subtle it isn’t. Loud it is. In the hands of Valery Gergiev and London Symphony Orchestra this week, pulverisingly loud.Can you easily believe that Strauss’s next opera was that fountain of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chances are that you have never heard of Roy “Chubby” Brown. He never performs on television, or is invited to be a guest on chat-shows or panel games, and hell would freeze over before Comic Relief would invite him to be one of their ambassadors in the developing world. And yet he constantly tours, sells DVDs by the bucketload and is one of the UK’s most successful comics.Comedy nerds, however, know that his stage costume is a striking ensemble of an ill-fitting patchwork suit, flying helmet and goggles, and that the Middlesbrough-born comic’s birth name, Royston Vasey, was used as the Read more ...
sheila.johnston
By trade Ryan Bingham is something called a Termination Facilitator. I'm not entirely sure if that's meant as a euphemism, but it sounds kind of scary and in fact, played by George Clooney with lubricated charm, Bingham is a hit-man contracted out to fire people from companies who don't have the cojones or the courtesy to break the bad news themselves. The procession of schmucks whom we see him fire so sympathetically, so efficiently, thrusting a glossy brochure into their hands when asked about the awkward issues, are played (most of them) by non-actors, reliving for the film the real trauma Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Startlingly, it’s 10 years since Sexy Beast, the infernally cunning gangster movie with a terrifying performance from Ben Kingsley at its core. Now Beast’s screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto are back with their new brainchild 44 Inch Chest. That authorial pedigree is written all over the screen (and in the way the air is turned perpetually blue), but this isn’t Sexy Beast II. It’s more like a visit from its long-lost extended family, and before the end you’re shifting uncomfortably in your seat and wondering how you can get rid of them without seeming ungrateful.The story is brutally Read more ...
David Nice
Just to contemplate the shifting talent pool of this chamber co-operative can be giddying. Last night 10 great ensemble players, from top violin soloist Alexander Sitkovetsky to three London orchestral principals who must have jumped at the chance to be part of the Razumovsky experience, had their work cut out. Schoenberg and Schubert ask each musician to run the full gamut of Viennese angst and joy. The result was an unrepeatable experience in the spiritual as well as the literal sense.Both Schubert's Octet and Schoenberg's early string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) can feel a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Greig’s delightful Midsummer (a play with songs), opened at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 2008, was revived for last year’s Fringe and now provides a warming tonic for frozen winter nights in London. A knowing, modern romcom about two thirtysomething lost souls from opposite ends of Edinburgh who find each other over the midsummer weekend, it could just as easily serve as a love-letter from the playwright to the city of his birth.You don’t have to know Scotland’s capital to follow the plot, but you will get more laughs out of the evening - many of them wry - if you do (and anyway, a map Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Audiences genuinely love Legally Blonde, and all but the most churlish of critics should crack plenty a smile, as well. A feel-good show that - unusually, in my experience - actually does leave you on a high, this stage adaptation of the 2001 Reese Witherspoon film benefits immeasurably from a rapturous star performance from Sheridan Smith as the unlikely heroine of Harvard Law School, Elle Woods. Throw in two terrific supporting turns from Alex Gaumond and Jill Halfpenny and a production that pushes for effect considerably less than it did on Broadway and you've got a Read more ...