Reviews
Jonathan Geddes
It is a testament to the enduring appeal of My Chemical Romance that this show was credited with having sold the most tickets in the OVO Hydro’s history, and yet still formed one of the group’s smaller dates on the UK leg of their reunion tour.Then again, it’s been over a decade since the group last toured here, and continual postponements had evidently only heightened anticipation. Every dimming of the lights or movement onstage prompting wild cheering from the Glasgow faithful, desperate to see their idols once again.When they did arrive, it was in unflashy fashion, a theme that ran Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The stage is cluttered with objects; a pianola sits stage left; a large cabinet, soon to be revealed as a display case for tiny glass ornaments, dominates the centre. A man, gaunt, in his 40s perhaps, wanders among this stuff.He is our narrator (Paul Hilton) and he tells us that what we will witness is a memory, the truth presented through an illusion. The set suddenly makes sense – because this is how we remember things. Objects loom large or small, music floats in and out and around us, triggering otherwise inaccessible recollections, spaces are porous. Tennessee Williams has made a world Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Superless are playing live for the first time. Instead of being bottom of a bill, this quartet have a prime spot at Bergen’s Nattjazz festival. Given the eminence of who’s in the band, it makes sense. Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass), Eirik Hegdal (woodwind) and Øyvind Skarbø (drums) are Norwegian and American guitarist Jeff Parker is based in Los Angeles.All four have enviable track records. Amongst the signposts are Håker Flaten’s membership of The Thing, Hegdal’s involvement with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Skarbø’s endless credits and Parker being in Tortoise. Whatever it is Superless are Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Rock’n’roll has been credited with incredible powers of rejuvenation many times before, but if there are two men who seem to have seriously benefitted from its mystical power, it’s Alice Cooper (74 years old) and Ian Astbury (60 years old). These are two men who would be eligible for free bus passes in the UK but who can still get down with the best of them – and are still in miraculously fine voice.The Cult were the first of the main acts to hit the stage in Birmingham this week and, despite whispers of a new album being on the horizon, restricted their set to the band’s '80s purple patch. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The fact that John Lydon has complained so long and so loudly about director Danny Boyle’s TV drama about the Sex Pistols has only served to pump up interest in the project.“I'm the one that wrote those songs, right. I gave them their image. I gave them everything. And they've done this rather snidey kind of piece of work behind my back," raged Lydon on ITV’s This Morning. Danny Boyle is an “arsehole”, he added (pictured below, the real John Lydon).A dollop of Rotten-esque spleen is just the job for pushing the show into the limelight, and its pacey, lurid and cartoon-like nature should Read more ...
stephen.walsh
With a lapse of three years between Das Rheingold and Siegfried, and with only a semi-staged Walküre in between, it’s been hard to stay tuned to Amy Lane’s Ring production at Longborough.Here, for instance, is Mime in his cave (rather well, if shabbily, furnished in Rhiannon Newman Brown’s bric-à-brac set), struggling to mend the sword which we haven’t seen broken, for the young Siegfried, of whose all-important parentage we as yet know nothing (Adrian Dwyer's Mime and Bradley Daley's Siegfried pictured below). Here, later, is Brünnhilde asleep on her mountain-top for reasons we haven’t Read more ...
Robert Beale
An opera in the Hallé concert series, conducted by Sir Mark Elder, is rather like a blend of a religious observance and a masterclass in orchestral playing and singing technique.The season finale at the Bridgewater Hall was Madama Butterfly, the first time in all his years in charge that Sir Mark has chosen Puccini for this treatment in the concert hall. He is a wizard at conveying this composer’s music, and, with a starry cast and a full symphony orchestra on the platform, the score came to life as probably never before for most of its hearers, even those who have experienced it in the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Sacre isn’t your average big-top show. Created by Brisbane-based company Circa, this is modern circus meets contemporary dance – a conceptual deconstruction of the traditional experience, represented in a show of impressive strength, with real people reacting and responding to one another’s energies and intentions.A group of 10 acrobats all in black dart around the stage with breathtaking speed and vigour, coming together and pushing apart in a series of lifts, throws and catches with alarming alacrity. They run, jump and fling themselves at each other at unexpected moments, hurling back Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By 1970, John Barry had composed music for Born Free, The Lion in Winter, Midnight Cowboy, You Only Live Twice and about 38 other films. His work with cinema began in 1960 and averaged around five films a year. In 1965, eight films were released with his music. He was busy.Yet when the album Ready When You Are, J.B. appeared in 1970, its liner notes said “he’s invisible most of the time.” Although he had recently appeared briefly in the film Deadfall, Barry was principally a backroom presence; his name less prominent than those of the songs or films he contributed to. Earlier, he’d hit the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Roger Michell’s films described a range of Englishness, from Notting Hill’s foppish comedy to acerbically humane Hanif Kureishi scripts (Venus, The Mother, The Buddha of Suburbia), Cornish Gothic (My Cousin Rachel) and his last feature, The Duke, which warmed working-class malcontent Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren’s frozen marriage with Wellington’s stolen portrait.The Duke’s docu-slivers of early ‘60s London dovetail into this film, finished the day Michell died. Other subjects were considered: Nick Drake, or apartheid-busting cricketer Basil D’Oliveira. It might as well be the Queen, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Playwrights return to classical myths for two main reasons – to shine a light on how we live today and because they're bloody good yarns.Marina Carr's re-telling of Clytemnestra's story is boldly innovative in its conception and execution, but it never loses sight of its source material's power – and we wonder how, if "Enough is Enough" didn't work thousands of years ago, how is it going to work now?King Agamemnon needs to do something as his men are mustered for war and the blood is up, but the winds will not come to fill their sails for the passage to Troy. Worse still, a potential Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
For die-hard Juliette Binoche fans – don’t cross us, we get angry – Between Two Worlds is heaven. The French star hardly ever leaves the screen during the film’s 106 minutes. It was her unwavering detemination that ensured the film came to be made in the first place. Binoche’s early attempts to bring to the screen Florence Aubenas’s best-selling 2010 book Le Quai de Ouistreham (published in English as The Night Cleaner) met with major resistance from the journalist. But Binoche persisted, as she does, and Aubenas eventually agreed it could be made on the condition that the Read more ...