America
Saskia Baron
Us is Jordan Peele’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 2017 horror film, Get Out, which won the first-time writer-director an Oscar for best original screenplay. A lot has been riding on this, Peele’s sophomore film with questions being raised over whether he would succumb to the pressures of a bigger budget and make a far more obviously commercial movie. So far Peele is riding the wave, Us has already broken records in the USA where it’s had the highest grossing opening weekend for an R rated film ever. It's also won mainstream critics’ praise for its attack on America's neglect of its Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Some monsters are real," notes a retribution-minded wife (Matilda Ziegler) early in Downstate, Bruce Norris's beautiful and wounding play that has arrived at the National Theatre in the production of a writer's dreams. But by the time this restless, ceaselessly provocative evening has come to its reflective close, you may find yourself reconsidering the efficacy of the word "monster" to describe any human being. Telling of four paedophiles sharing a group home in "downstate" Illinois, 280 miles south of Chicago, Norris all but demands that an audience see humanity in the round. So successful Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Joshua Harmon knows how to stir and excite an audience and does that and more with Admissions, newly arrived in the West End as part of the ongoing tsunami of American theatre across the capital just now. Opening the same day as news reports of financial bribery and malfeasance deployed to gain admissions to America's top universities, Harmon's portrait of a family poleaxed by their teenage son's fraught route to college comes with an unexpectedly topical urgency. But neither this writer nor his exceedingly smart director, Daniel Aukin, needs to coast on headlines to make their point. As Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Modern’s retrospective of Dorothea Tanning is a revelation. Here the American artist is known as a latter day Surrealist, but as the show demonstrates, this is only part of the story. Tanning’s career spanned an impressive 70 years – she died in 2012 aged 101 – but as so often happens, she was eclipsed by her famous husband, German Surrealist Max Ernst. They met in New York; he was scouting for artists to include in an exhibition staged by his then wife, Peggy Guggenheim. On the easel in Tanning's studio was Birthday, 1942 (pictured below right) a newly finished self portrait. The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's a lovely, quietly subversive musical lurking somewhere in Waitress, and for extended passages in the second act that show is allowed to shine through. The flip side means putting up with an often coarse first act that seems to have taken its cue from its sister show in female emancipation, the Dolly Parton-scored 9 to 5, playing down the street. The advantage for Waitress is Grammy ceremony semi-regular Sara Bareilles's eclectic and catchy score, and a clutch of winning performances capable of taking even the hoariest material (you've seen almost all these characters before) and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You might think an American high school comedy an unlikely place to locate a love letter to Oscar Wilde – even if there’s a flamboyantly gay story behind it. But Freak Show screenwriters Beth Rigazio and Patrick J Clifton, adapting James St James’ source story, have a way with wit that is clearly aiming to match the writer whom they keep quoting. The fact that they sometimes try rather too hard doesn’t detract from the full-on experience that is producer Trudie Styler’s 2017 directorial debut, a film that sustains itself on the sheer over-the-top camp energy of its teenage hero, Billy Bloom, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not just the Peter Pan of Pop, but also its very own Houdini. With the aid of shed-loads of money, an illusion-spinning PR machine and the most aggressive lawyers that money could buy, Michael Jackson managed to make it to his premature exit in 2009 without being sent to jail. Dan Reed’s sprawling two-part documentary Leaving Neverland comes to bury Jackson, and to do posthumously what nobody managed to achieve in his lifetime.Reed focuses on the stories of two boys who became, for a time – or perhaps forever, considering the terrible emotional legacy it all left them with – Jackson’s pets. Read more ...
David Nice
In a way, he was a second Bernstein. Only 11 years Lenny's junior, and living to the much riper age of 89 – his 90th birthday would have been on 6 April – André Previn was a film composer and arranger at the start of his 70-plus-year career, a jazz pianist in a class of his own, and another fine conductor who also took his mission to educate seriously (and to entertain not so seriously, as underlined by that appearance on The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, destined to be endlessly recycled now).Something of the fire had gone out of his conducting by the time I met him in his Reigate Read more ...
howard.male
Although this is a review of an album and not a single song, Rhiannon Giddens’s extraordinary “Mama’s Cryin’ Long” is the hub (or perhaps emotional black hole might be a more apt description) around which the rest of this collection of new material inspired by historical accounts of slavery revolves. Nothing is more heartbreaking and chilling than a song brimming with pain that’s been designed to uplift. And of course slavery itself produced many such songs. But after just one listen to this extraordinary piece of call-and-response storytelling – with each of its vivid yet economic lines Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning. The premise of Sam Bourne’s thrilling novel is the existence of a conspiracy to annihilate all the evidence of historic atrocities through the millennia. Books, of course, must go, and in a neat twist even the biggest book distribution centres, Amazon included, are targeted. Bourne’s great gift is to take reality and give it a good shove, a what if? that we are persuaded Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An entirely electric leading performance from the fast-rising Ukweli Roach is the reason for being for revisiting Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, back in London for the first major production since the late Philip Seymour Hoffman brought his acclaimed Off Broadway premiere of it to the Donmar in 2002. Since then, author Stephen Adly Guirgis has to be honest written better plays, not least the thrilling The Motherf**er with the Hat which doesn't try so hard to flag its bravura at every turn. Kate Hewitt's revival for the Young Vic rides the inbuilt energy of the play, but the net result is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just when you think you may have heard (and seen) enough of Donald J Trump to last a lifetime, along comes Anne Washburn's ceaselessly smart and tantalising Shipwreck to focus renewed attention on the psychic fallout left by 45. How did we get here from there? Washburn certainly brushes up against the topic that animated a recent, similarly Trump-inflected play, Sweat. But Washburn's purposefully baggy, shape-shifting play resists categorisation at every turn: equal measures history play, polemic, and generational saga, Shipwreck confounds expectation and may at times confound an Read more ...