New York
Joe Muggs
Alicia Keys is a puzzling mixture. On the one hand she’s the hyper-achieving, multi-platinum, 752-Grammy-winning America’s sweetheart, all dimply smiles, positive-thinking ultra sincerity and the kind of showbiz over-emoting and singing-technique-as-competitive-sport so beloved of talent show contestants. On the other, she’s an undeniably interesting artist on multiple levels.Solo and with her husband Swizz Beats she’s a skilled and prolific songwriter and producer for others as well as herself: the pair’s work on Whitney Houston’s “Million Dollar Bill” alone is premier league material. And Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No. 4 Turku Philharmonic Orchestra/Leif Segerstam, with Essi Luttinen (mezzo-soprano) (Alba)Leif Segerstam can be a maddeningly inconsistent conductor, a musician whose recordings can frustrate as much as they inspire. He’s recorded Mahler 4 before, unremarkably, with Danish forces on Chandos, so it’s good to report that this new Finnish version is a zinger. The Turku Philharmonic’s lean, clear sound suits this transparently scored symphony especially well, though there’s no lack of weight in the bigger climaxes. Intermittent dark clouds may threaten the symphony’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Remember when romcoms didn't try so hard? That question kept going through my head for the first half, or more, of Broken Hearts Gallery, a film from Canadian writer-director Natalie Krinsky that ultimately in tugging at the heart but has to go through some fairly tortured narrative hoops to get to that point. It's the incidental pleasures that accrue this time round as opposed to the inevitable genre tropes. Who would have thought, for instance, that a passing reference to Kenosha, Wisconsin, would have an entirely new and troubling resonance by the time of this film's release? At such Read more ...
Matt Wolf
After months spent sifting amongst the virtual, I'm pleased to report that live performance looks to be on the (socially distanced) rebound. The week ahead sees the start of a six-week run at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park of the alfresco venue's seismically exciting revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, this time performed in concert with multiple casts due to the vocal demands of the score. And the ever-wistful and beautiful A Little Night Music finds the onetime Olivier Award winners from Carousel (a lifetime ago, and yet the memory is entirely immediate) pairing up once again: Janie Read more ...
Graham Fuller
RKO’s Dance, Girl, Dance was remarkable as a vehicle for two emerging stars, Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball, that stealthily radicalised its backstage setting and tried to slap moviegoers out of their comfort zone – probably the reason it failed commercially on release in August 1940.The fifteenth and penultimate feature directed by Dorothy Arzner, Hollywood’s only female director of the 1930s and 1940s, turned a routine comic melodrama about rival hoofers into a vexed appraisal of the compromises faced by women performers striving for success, whether financially or creatively, in the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Know thyself” is the theme of A Rainy Day in New York. Woody Allen’s 48th film as writer-director, is – despite what you may have heard – at once his funniest and most reflective movie in years. Either wilfully archaic or stubbornly nostalgic, as his later work has tended to be, its story of a privileged youth who learns he must reject the life prescribed for him by an overbearing parent is universal; Allen’s unfamiliarity with Gen Z lingo and smarts doesn’t invalidate its core truths.Issued on DVD and Blu-ray (without extras) in the UK 52 days after its VOD release, the film remains Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
At this year’s Oscars Bong Joon Ho brought the audience to its feet in honour of the director whose words had struck a chord with him as a film student. The comment, simple but difficult to adhere to in the cut-throat, risk-averse movie business, was that “the most personal is the most creative”. The director, Martin Scorsese.Of course, Scorsese’s The Irishman was also in contention in the same ceremony, the film a powerful continuation of themes, collaborations and inimitable film language of a career spanning more than 50 years – and proof that the American is still following his Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The journalistic addiction-memoir is a crowded genre these days: Details editor Dan Perez chronicles his massive intake of Vicodin and other opioids in As Needed for Pain; New York Times columnist Eilene Zimmerman pieces together her husband’s drug addiction in Smacked, and now Terri White, editor-in-chief of Empire magazine and former editor of Time Out New York, shares with us her benders, blackouts and hospitalisations, somehow combined with an impressive career path, in the vivid, painful Coming Undone.Born in Derbyshire to a teenage mum “with the best bum in the village”, her childhood Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021. Instead, we get the early release on Disney+ of Miranda’s Hamilton – filmed, NT Live style, with the original Broadway cast at three performances in June 2016, and now available to a wide audience for the first time. Who could say no to this? Stage director Thomas Kail also helms the film, and the result is an exhilarating, immersive experience of this dynamic musical about America’s forgotten Founding Father, who travels from Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A musical featuring two people who are physically separated? Jason Robert Brown’s work is a shutdown natural – as this new digital theatre version demonstrates. Lauren Samuels and Danny Becker, who play doomed lovers Cathy and Jamie, recorded their parts entirely in isolation, with Samuels (previously starring as Cathy in 2011 at Chiswick Playhouse) also directing.The result is a piece that firmly retains its theatrical DNA – in contrast to the Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan-starring movie adaptation, which changed up the format to have the characters sharing space. Of course, current social Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As lockdown continues, National Theatre at Home has announced its final sequence of plays, and several of the very best are being saved for last. That certainly applies to this week's offering, Small Island, whose dissection of Britain's racist past couldn't be timelier. Broadway's Lincoln Center Theater, meanwhile, mined a bygone theatrical period in the comparably epic Act One, whilst the week's offerings also accommodate in-the-moment protest theatre, an acclaimed West African Hamlet, and a recent Olivier Award-winning actor playing a peacock, as you do. For more on the latest amalgam of Read more ...
David Nice
It's taken time, but at last we have two major musical figures speaking up for cultural institutions in dire straits. Following a crucial, detailed article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian, Simon Rattle and Mark Elder have finally taken up the cudgels as their colleagues in the theatre world have been doing for weeks.What remains devastatingly clear is that with government subsidy of cultural institutions running at 20 per cent rather than the 70 or 80 on the continent, the kind of socially-distanced events which are being so well managed in Germany, Sweden, Norway and Czechia - others Read more ...