Nodding to John Ford, Shane and almost every other western ever made, baby-faced writer/director/producer/lead Seth MacFarlane (Ted) replaces the shocking genius of Blazing Saddles with swearing and jokes about bodily functions in a fast, funny, get-it-or-get-out comedy that will divide friends, ruin families and make a lot of people laugh. Whether you’re one of them, you’ll have to watch and see.MacFarlane is Albert Stark, a frontier nerd whose refusal in a gunfight loses his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried). Distraught, he takes comfort in the friendship of unmarried Christian couple Edward and Read more ...

We've had endless waves of vampires, zombies and Frankenstein's monsters, so why not bundle them all together under the same doomily Gothic roof? Welcome to Penny Dreadful, created by writer John Logan and producer Sam Mendes (who previously worked together on the Bond movie Skyfall), in which we descend into a "demi-monde" of monsters and necromancy in Victorian London.Though the series is named after the lurid serial publications popular in the 19th century, which featured the likes of Sweeney Todd and Sexton Blake, the trickiest part here is picking your way through the reverberations from Read more ...

Is this the same Tatyana whose life depended on every word of her letter to straw idol Onegin at the 2009 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition? Then, Ekaterina Shcherbachenko – she’s since dropped the first “h” in transliteration – gave the most convincing, nuanced interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s famous Letter Scene, his reason for setting Pushkin’s verse-novel about youthful idealism and lost illusions. She enjoyed some success in Dmitri Tcherniakov's strangely compelling Bolshoi re-think. Now, though she looks ideally young and vulnerable, it’s all semaphoring gestures and telephone- Read more ...

Lovely singer, consummate pianist, shame about the programme. “Art song” is a rather prissy term, but we could have done with a few to ballast a diet of old pop – French chansons, Italian canzonettas, Spanish canciones, Victor Herbert tralala. Even a few substantial operatic arias with piano accompaniment made have made a difference. Not that Pretty Yende didn’t reveal her instinctive musicality and the lessons of her bel canto training in Milan at some point in every number, but an evening of encores is just too much for even the sweetest tooth.In fact it was one of the genuine encores which Read more ...

As Literary Review's "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" recognises, there's not a lot that's funnier and more damaging to a story's credibility than an attempt to be sexy that falls flat or, even better, that misfires spectacularly. Some of the most famous movie duds - Showgirls, Body of Evidence, Boxing Helena, Colour of Night - which are beloved of course by a certain type of film enthusiast, this reviewer included, strive for smouldering and deliver mainly laughs. Which brings us to the latest example of inept eroticism: In Secret, debut writer-director Charlie Stratton's adaptation of Zola's 19th Read more ...

Usually, to describe a play as "of its time" is a criticism. It is suggestive of drama that hasn't aged well, that doesn't work quite as well for today's audience as it did for the original crowd. First performed in 1847, Dion Boucicault's The School for Scheming seems at first glance to fall into this category, with its mannered language, twisting plot and moral overtones.But, as this revival demonstrates, pre-emptive assumptions of staleness can be confounded by a production that is all witty observations, sly mimicry and sarcastic asides. As the title would suggest, the action Read more ...

Can there be a conductor with a clearer and more affirming beat than Mariss Jansons with the Concertgebouw Orchestra when they're at their best? The listener can just marvel at his capacity to work in partnership with this fine orchestra, to underline and reinforce everything they do, to enable them to land cleanly, decisively and unanimously, to introduce new ideas with care, precision and beauty, to treat the end of phrases with respect, love and punctiliousnes.Jansons can make the Concertgebouw sound in every respect and in every department a marvellous orchestra, even in a hall like the Read more ...

Had this Moscow production any serious ideas in its head until its suddenly effective epilogue, much might have been pertinently said about an opera in which an imperialistic campaign ends in disaster, and where the Polovtsian “enemy” shows far more signs of a civilized life and wartime courtesy than the corrupt, crumbling court at home. Unfortunately veteran director Yuri Alexandrov’s very selective take on Borodin’s fitfully wondrous score asks for not a moment of dramatic truth from its principal singers: a great shame, because the voices are never less than stalwart, the chorus and Read more ...

An orchestral musician recently told me that only one per cent of graduates from UK music colleges go on to take up a post in an established opera company or orchestra. You’d think, given such an alarming statistic, that there would be a lot of very good voices floating around trying to drum up work. Young talent is enterprisingly putting itself out there in a new wave of pub or site-specific fringe performances. I’ve shied away from pocket Verdi and Puccini stagings because I really wonder if those operas can take any but the most highly-trained, opulent voices; anything less is selling them Read more ...

Only the most antagonistic of diva fanciers, opera queens, call them what you will, would deny coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay her place as one of the great singing actresses of our time. The size and range of the voice are rather more limited for the role of giant-hearted Violetta, Verdi’s Parisian courtesan who sacrifices true love on the altar of convention and dies of consumption.Not that it matters too much in film-maker Philippe Béziat’s take on the opera, originally Traviata et nous, in which he guides us through the drama chronologically but very selectively from rehearsal room to Read more ...

Valery Gergiev once described Yevgeny Svetlanov’s USSR - later Russian - State Symphony Orchestra to me as “an orchestra with a voice”. Then Svetlanov died and the voice cracked. Which are the other big Russian personalities now? Gergiev’s own Mariinsky? I don’t hear it. Yuri Temirkanov can still bend the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra to his own whim of iron. The Russian National Orchestra was never in the running. But the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, to give its full title, still sounds as deep and rich as it did when I last heard it live nearly 30 years ago.You can Read more ...

Showboys will be boys – gym-bunny sailors, in this instance – as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain’s daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan’s all-male Gilbert and Sullivan: a loving attempt to recreate, she says, the innocence of musical theatre in same-sex schools (mine, for which I played Sir Joseph Porter with a supporting army or navy of recorders, two cellos and piano, was mixed).This time, the naval high jinks allow Regan to evoke a kind of Privates on Parade scenario, the show-without-the-show set below deck on a World War Two battleship – or so we Read more ...