Edinburgh
Edinburgh Fringe 2019 reviews: Josie Long / Snort / Sara BarronTuesday, 06 August 2019Josie Long The Stand ★★★★ It has been five years since Josie Long performed a full run at the Fringe, and in the meantime she has experienced a momentous event. She has had a daughter – whom she welcomed into the world, she tells us, with an... Read more... |
Edinburgh Festival 2019 reviews: Below the Blanket / Samson Young: Real MusicTuesday, 06 August 2019Below the Blanket ★★★★ There’s a deep vein of melancholy running through Glasgow producing house Cryptic’s promenade installation Below the Blanket, which currently occupies several sites across Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden.... Read more... |
Edinburgh Festival 2019 reviews: Enough / SplicedMonday, 05 August 2019Enough ★★★★ Immaculately turned out in winning smiles, navy and nylon, cabin crew Jane and Toni dispense comforting reassurance and flirty glances to passengers at 30,000 feet. Down on the ground, though, they’re juggling kids... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2019 reviews: Ciaran Dowd/ Tom Parry/ Suzi Ruffell, Pleasance CourtyardMonday, 05 August 2019Ciaran Dowd ***At the Fringe last year, Ciaran Dowd won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer for his show Don Rodolfo. Now he’s back with the follow-up, Padre Rodolfo. In this tall tale Don Rodolfo has stopped being the guy who puts “... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: composer Alastair White on his new opera ROBEWednesday, 31 July 2019A robe can be many things. Sure, it’s a garment, but it can also be cover, a disguise, a costume or a uniform. It’s also something composed of many different threads woven together to create something much bigger. It’s these kinds of layers of... Read more... |
Manic Street Preachers, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - 20th anniversary tour lets underrated songs shineMonday, 27 May 2019Nothing brings home the difference between sequencing an album and sequencing a live show like going to see a classic album played in its entirety. And Manic Street Preachers’ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours – described by frontman James Dean... Read more... |
Local Hero, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh - captivating musical with a harder edgeWednesday, 27 March 2019“Cult” is probably an over-used adjective, especially when it comes to movies. But there’s undoubtedly something truly special about Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film – about a Texan oil executive on a mission to buy up a section of the Scottish coast for a... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: guitarist Sean ShibeTuesday, 02 October 2018First it was the soft acoustic guitar playing, which on three occasions to three very different audiences won a silence so intense it was almost deafening. Then the loud electric, first heard in Anstruther's Dreel Halls as part of the 2017 East Neuk... Read more... |
Twelfth Night, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh - a touch too sweetThursday, 27 September 2018“Well, that was really sweet,” one young audience member in front of me remarked on his way out of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. And yes, there’s no denying that director Wils Wilson’s colourful, psychedelic, summer-of-love-set Twelfth Night, the... Read more... |
Edinburgh Festival 2018 reviews: Home / The PrisonerMonday, 27 August 2018Home ★★★★ Philadelphia-based theatre artist Geoff Sobelle has scored highly with two previous Edinburgh Fringe shows. Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, way back in 2010, imagined the natural world wreaking ruthless... Read more... |
Edinburgh Festival 2018 review: Benedetti, Baltimore SO, Alsop - puzzlingly tameMonday, 27 August 2018The Edinburgh International Festival scored quite a coup in securing the services of Bernstein protégée Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on the very day of the great composer/conductor’s centenary – and for the festival’s penultimate... Read more... |
Edinburgh Festival 2018 review: Aimard, SCO, Pintscher - psychedelic visionsSaturday, 25 August 2018There were two immediate casualties at Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s high-energy account of Messiaen’s monumental Des canyons aux étoiles… with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival.First was one of the strings in the... Read more... |