Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall comeback concert on Sunday, 23 April 1961 has often been lauded as "the greatest night in show business history", though that judgment surely depends on where Garland sits in one’s personal pantheon. Elvis’s made-for-television 68 Comeback Special, the king lean in leather, must be up there, and likely Sinatra at Madison Square Garden in 1974. Whatever, the sold-out performance featured some 25 standards, Garland backed by a 40-piece orchestra conducted by Mort Lindsey. Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton, and Julie Andrews were in the audience. The album, Judy at Read more ...

After his record-breaking and warmly remembered Love On Tour, Harry Styles is back with a fresh, slightly more experimental twist on universal, blockbusting live pop. The revision of his performance style is subtle enough that Together, Together feels comfortable and familiar but the minor rebrand that came with his latest album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. sufficiently spices things up. Following a glittery, feel good singalong with Shania Twain to warm things up, “Are You Listening Yet?” opens the show, with tangible gratitude flying through the stadium from Styles in the Read more ...

You’d watch Hamnet for the visuals alone, director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal flooding the screen with lush greens and browns, 16th century rural England brought to physical life with an eye-popping attention to detail. We first meet Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in dense woodland gathering plants, a gift for falconry signalling her otherness. Though the locals whisper that she’s the daughter of a witch, she proves irresistible to glove maker and Latin tutor William (Paul Mescal). He charms her with his storytelling abilities and she reciprocates by reading his palm, hinting at a Read more ...

Can you remember what you were doing on 23 June 2016? You might well have been out to cast your vote in the EU referendum, which has thrown its interminable shadow over our benighted country ever since.Or maybe you just stayed in bed, which wouldn’t have been a bad choice because after all the shouting, campaigning, anger and bitterness, nobody got what they wanted. Remainers failed to remain, and Brexiteers didn’t get anything they considered worthy of the name “Brexit”. President Obama had theatrically flown in to warn us to remain or else, but he must have been disappointed when nobody Read more ...

There’s not – and never has been, really – that much discourse about commercial dance music as music. It’s either talked about by ageing doomers (“oh the kids just want to film on their phones, they don’t dance any more”), as spectacle or social phenomenon, without ever really differentiating EDM from big room house from bassline from whatever else. Not that musicians like Sonny Fodera probably care, mind. Over 13 years and now six albums, racking up quarter-billion stream songs at a time, and ubiquitous in pop radio as much as mega-raves, Fodera has constantly trodden an interesting line Read more ...

Freshly-exhumed from the vaults, this latest Children's Film Foundation selection follows an established template. We get nine pacy short features taken from different eras in the CFF’s existence (in this case, between 1954 and 1980), along with a selection of choice extras. BFI producer and film historian Vic Pratt’s booklet notes are worth this set’s purchase price alone: that “CFF films were good, clean, fast-moving fun: short, sweet, high on kid-based comedy hi-jinks and straightforward adventure; low on boring grown-ups’ stuff like romance or overly complicated plots” pretty much sums up Read more ...

With impeccable timing, the Orange Tree in Richmond has scheduled a one-act play that’s exactly what a beleaguered public needs: 75 minutes of mind-bendingly ludicrous physical comedy in the form of Peter Shaffer’s 1965 hit, Black Comedy. It's still a lethal weapon.Farce was a theatrical staple at that time, regularly broadcast on primetime television from the Whitehall Theatre. A pants-down Brian Rix in flamboyant underwear invaded the nation’s living rooms long before serious dramas with suggestive sex scenes were allowed in. So Shaffer was working fertile soil. (Spoiler alert if you have Read more ...

In a small Appalachian village, where people say “Y’all” and prospectors are still searching for silver in the mountains, Barbara Allen wants more than the humdrum life of a Trad wife (as I suppose you would call it these days). Already a bit of a rebel, she has a suitor, the dim, fighty Marvin, but there’s something just there, she knows, if only she could see it.She’s right, of course, else we wouldn’t have a show, and that something is Witch Boy John, part of a coven of sex-mad spirits whose hedonistic lifestyle has become dulled by its accompanying alienation. He wants to feel joy and Read more ...

Screenwriter Neil Forsyth earned kudos a-plenty with his two BBC One series of The Gold, a dramatisation of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery and its aftermath. Now he’s stepped aboard the good ship Netflix for this story of heroin-pushing gangs in London and Liverpool, set in the dying days of the Thatcher government at the turn of the Nineties.Again the story is rooted in fact, and explores how a group of fairly lowly customs officers were recruited to infiltrate and destroy a multi-million pound heroin racket that was wreaking havoc with both poor kids in Northern housing estates as Read more ...

Melbourne’s petite popstrel Kylie Minogue zoomed to superstardom in the late Eighties, with her celebrity from Aussie TV soap Neighbours helping to boost her spectacular recording career under the manipulative auspices of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit factory. Apocryphally, her debut UK Number One hit "I Should Be So Lucky" was knocked together in a brisk 40 minutes, though, interviewed here in director Michael Harte's compelling three-part documentary, Pete Waterman insists it took all of two hours.Suddenly Kylie was a pop phenomenon, banging out chartbusters as easily as some people Read more ...

It’s safe to say Oscar Wilde enjoyed a good party, so it’s very likely he would give a big thumbs up to the Lyric’s An Ideal Husband, which director Nicholas La Barrie has souped up as an Afro-Caribbean comedy of manners, featuring added workouts on the dance floor.This turns out to be a timely play: a tale of a politician who once passed on key insider knowledge to a third party, whose return favour set him up for a stellar career. Insert the names of our former US ambassador and his cronies, and you can sense the magnitude of the error of judgment the younger Robert Chiltern made. Now his Read more ...

A gig with Tricky remains a trip to the Underworld: forever shrouded in almost total darkness, his haunting voice barely audible, he’s an artist who’s always shunned the spotlight, seen through the charade of celebrity fame, and made a virtue out being a shade rather than a hero. He’s never been shy of plumbing the depths – drawing, with tons of originality and creative energy, from a family and community background steeped in violence, the curse of suicide, and a super-sensitivity that prejudiced his breath and skin. His preference for a darkened stage might suggest a parallel with Read more ...