Christmas
Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!, New Adventures, Sadler's Wells TheatreThursday, 15 December 2011
Here’s a mindboggling statistic. By my calculation, some 330,000 seats are going to be offered for sale in London and Birmingham for just one ballet this Christmas - that’s live seats, not counting the three (yes, three) cinema screenings of foreign... Read more... |
CD: Kate Rusby - While Mortals SleepThursday, 15 December 2011
Christmas albums are often a time to forget about the other 11 months of the year and get stuck into some festive silliness. Not for Kate Rusby. On this, her second volume of carols inspired by the South Yorkshire tradition, she’s still doggedly... Read more... |
DVDs for Christmas: ClassicalWednesday, 14 December 2011
Unlike audio recordings, classical DVDs can only be properly taken in if you're sitting down for 80 minutes, ideally in the same seat. So they have to be pretty special to warrant repeated viewings. So much depends on the... Read more... |
CD: The Wurzels - The Wurzels Christmas AlbumWednesday, 14 December 2011
In truth this probably deserves one star rather than two but it’s all about expectations, isn’t it. A Yuletide outing from the professional bumpkins who hit big in 1976 with "I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester", replete with a dopey-eyed cartoon... Read more... |
DVDs for Christmas: ComedyMonday, 12 December 2011
Tommy Tiernan Crooked Man (Pias Comedy)Tommy Tiernan is a well-kept Irish secret. He won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1998 and until recently confined his touring mostly to his native Ireland and America, but now thankfully the... Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, Arts TheatreMonday, 12 December 2011
That a tale confronting society’s most pernicious evils, giving poverty a human face and desperation a voice, should become a cornerstone of the British festive experience is perhaps unexpected: testimony either to the moral deviance of the general... Read more... |
Herding Cats, Hampstead TheatreMonday, 12 December 2011
Loneliness is hard to put on stage. There is something about the feeling of unwanted urban solitude which is so repetitive and, let’s face it, boring, that writing a play about it risks sending the audience into the night before the story is... Read more... |
CD: She & Him – A Very She & Him ChristmasMonday, 12 December 2011
There are plenty of recent examples of videogenic movie stars embarking on questionable musical pursuits, from Keanu Reeves to Scarlett Johansson, to name two whose rhythmic careers should have been throttled at birth. Zooey Deschanel, Hollywood's... Read more... |
Christmas Dance on Cinema, TV & RadioMonday, 12 December 2011
No more is dance the preserve of the few sitting in the theatre - larger companies are leaping hungrily for TV and now cinema screens, having found various ways around the longstanding obstacle of copyright. The BBC is experimenting with live 3D... Read more... |
Opinion: There's more to children's theatre than pantoMonday, 05 December 2011
So, Christmas again then. Ho ho ho. It comes around every year. Cards, crackers, baubles, TV specials. And panto. I am a playwright. I write mostly for children and their families. I tend not to say I'm a children's writer because it's rare that a... Read more... |
The Nutcracker, Royal BalletSunday, 04 December 2011
The Nutcracker, if this isn’t too much of a mixed culinary metaphor, divides audiences like Marmite: love it or hate it. Usually it’s the critics who hate it, and for them it is often only the annual round of Nuts to be Cracked that wears on the... Read more... |
Downton Abbey aims to rule Yuletide schedulesSaturday, 03 December 2011
ITV has been cunningly trailing its Christmas bumper edition of Downton Abbey, which will feature guest stars Nigel Havers and Samantha Bond and the spectacle of Mr Bates being dragged before the beak for murdering his first wife. Now that details... Read more... |
