New York
Joe Muggs
Mary J Blige is a monumental musical power. 30+ years, 14 albums, various labels and untold collaborations into her career, she still has the ability to deliver records that push everything else aside, existing entirely on their own terms and forcing other cultural forces to rearrange around them. Thus with Good Morning Gorgeous. This album has a stack of new and veteran guests and ranges in production style from lush Seventies soul to viciously sharp, UK-influenced electronic drill beats – but all of these are bent to Blige’s will: they all become adjuncts to her voice, song structures Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A small film that packs a significant wallop, The Humans snuck into view at the very end of 2021 to cast a despairing shadow that extends well beyond the Thanksgiving day during which it takes place. Adapted from the much-traveled Tony-winning play of the same name, writer-director Stephen Karam's screen iteration of his own one-act seems even bleaker in this iteration than it did in my twofold experience of it on stage (including at the Hampstead, with its original New York cast, in autumn 2018). .Those who think American drama too often offers its characters the easy way out won't find that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre has a good record in staging classic American drama by black playwrights. James Baldwin's The Amen Corner, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs have all had terrific new stagings. Now it’s the turn of activist writer Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, which was first successfully produced off-Broadway in 1955. By a grim irony, this play — which attacks the attitudes of white producers and directors towards black creatives — was itself a victim of racism: the proposed transfer to Broadway fell through because Childress wouldn’t tone Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It seemed impossible and yet, the other evening, while idly flicking through emails, I learned the unimaginable: Stephen Sondheim, age 91, had passed away. And very quickly by all accounts, given that he was reported to have enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal with friends just the previous day."They die but they don't," goes a lyric from Into the Woods, as my mind filled with multiple responses to the news, many of them culled from his work (and often cited by others in their own, instantaneous reactions). I, too, was "sorry/grateful" – bereft at the news and yet grateful for the work. But I suppose Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vera is in a New York hospital room giving birth to a son. On anxiously checked phones, the votes are piling up for Hillary, but the states are piling up for Trump. Vera’s world will never be the same again.Mathilde Dratwa’s new play, Milk and Gall (directed by Lisa Spirling, Theatre 503's Artistic Director), takes a searingly unsentimental look at 21st century parenting in the big city, mining plenty of laughs along the way. Speaking from experience, I can vouch that it’s all true – except, perhaps, that the reality is even worse!In her mid-thirties, Vera ( Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Todd Haynes’ documentary about the Velvet Underground has to be one of the better uses of time by a film-maker during the Covid pandemic. He spent lockdown putting the film together with a team of archivists and editors working remotely. It’s a beautifully shot and ingeniously collaged portrait of the decadent New York band which weaves together an extraordinary wealth of archive footage and some choice and apposite interviews. Unlike recent music documentaries which have had a tendency to corral extraneous talking heads singing the praises of their subjects a little too loudly (The Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Much has happened in the five years since your reviewer braved the steep rake at The Other Palace and saw The Last Five Years (not least my now getting its “Nobody needs to know” nod in Hamilton – worth a fistful of Tonys in prestige, I guess) so it’s timely to revisit Jason Robert Brown’s musical. Jonathan O’Boyle’s 2020 production transfers from Southwark Playhouse to the Garrick Theatre, with some of the show's flaws remaining, but others addressed. The common ground is that a relatively young audience (some not much older than the work itself, now past its teenage years) loved it and that Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
More than once, reading Colson Whitehead’s latest novel Harlem Shuffle, the brilliant Josh and Benny Safdie movie Uncut Gems from 2019 came to mind, which was unexpected. For one, Whitehead’s book takes place on the other side of Central Park, far uptown from the film’s downtown Diamond District setting. It also unfolds in a meticulously recreated 1960s era Harlem rather than the early 2010s. But like the film, Harlem Shuffle has more than its fair share of precious stones and dollar-stuffed envelopes passing hands and, as its name promises, more than a touch of that film’s hectic energy; a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s a modesty to the Felice Brothers, an absenting of ego, even as they seek glimmers of transcendence in the vast American night. These working-class Americana veterans are enriched by their native upstate New York, with its economic scars and natural beauty, fitting between the region’s folk mythologisers The Band and more cosmic Mercury Rev. Their music also exist in a vivid landscape, at once ruefully realistic at their nation’s ills, and aching for grace.From Dreams to Dust is bracketed by panoramic visions. Balmy sax curls through the motorik boogie of “Jazz On the Autobahn”, which Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dylan’s 1980s weren’t great in terms of critical acclaim. As an emerging new fan, I knew that first hand from the scathing reviews accorded Shot of Love by the British music press when it was released in the summer of 1981, it seemed about as welcome as a door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness first thing on a Sunday morning. Saved’s proselytising may have tipped the balance. “The hand is in the hand” Picasso once remarked – describing the most reliable marker of an artists’ skill – and the hands raised up in the album art for 1980’s Saved stuck out in the wider culture like Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The shadow of the Holocaust and the horror of the camps haunts literature and the cinema: from The Reader to The Night Porter, from Schindler’s List to Son of Saul. For some, the subject was beyond authentic representation – and perhaps only a poetic masterpiece such as Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”, with its sombre and recurring images could come close to making the violence and tragedy in some way true.Sydney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, which tells the story of a camp survivor whose wife and children were murdered by the Nazis, manages the challenge through the very intense performance of the lead Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
There just isn’t enough there, with ANNA X. Daniel Raggett’s production is the third and final of the RE:EMERGE season at the Harold Pinter Theatre, with Emma Corrin of Lady Di fame in the lead. The graphic design – the brightly-striped faces of Corrin and her co-star, Nabhaan Rizwan, on a dark background – is impeccable. Joseph Charlton’s writing, not so much.Based on “true events”, ANNA X is about a young Russian woman with an art degree who cons people into believing she’s rich, and a tech entrepreneur who falls for it. They’re both living in New York, which in Charlton’s nightmare vision Read more ...