New York
India Lewis
Anglo-Irish author Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, is a puzzle, a game of family secrets played through the generations. Set partly in New York and partly in a small town in Donegal, the book moves back and forth through time and space becoming, in the process, a compulsive read: a fascinating Russian nesting doll of family trauma.There are obvious cliches in the familial "saga" genre, which at times can make the book feel a little artificial, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating, often heartbreaking tale. We open with the traumatic loss of the Cora’s father in the chaos of 9/11. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A band you’re gonna like, whether you like it or not.” The proclamation in the press ads for the New York Dolls’ debut album acknowledged they were a hard sell.At this point, in July 1973, the band was a New York phenomenon. There had been an anti-climactic brush with the UK in October and November 1972, some Boston shows and one-off dates in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but otherwise they had played only to audiences in the city and the nearby boroughs in which they had formed.If wider audiences were “gonna like” proto-punk glam outfit the New York Dolls, it needed more than what they had done so Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Babygirl starts with the sound of sex, piped in over the credits. There's a lot of it on our screens at the moment, from Disclaimer on Apple TV to Anora and Queer at the cinema, much of it noisily explicit. The intimacy co-ordinators must be having a field day.Back in the saddle is Nicole Kidman, some 25 years after she appeared naked on the tiny Donmar stage, almost within touching distance of the audience. She has been eliciting cooing responses for her “bravery” in taking on her latest role, of a sexually unfulfilled CEO of a big robotics company who embarks on a dangerous affair with Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There is something deliciously perfect about the timing of The Producers’ arrival at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In these twitchy times, Mel Brooks’s scurrilous Hitler musical lands like a stinkbomb in a parfumerie.Swastikas are everywhere, even on the backs of pigeons; there’s a man dressed as Jesus serving a tray of champagne, a bearded Hasidic dancer brandishing a prayer roll who wafts in and out of the routines, geriatric humping and prolific swearing; even Michelangelo’s David turns up, created by a dancer in a white bodysuit and wig, his “marble” tackle prominently to the fore. If you Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's second time only quasi-lucky for The Devil Wears Prada, the stage musical adaptation of the much-loved Meryl Streep film from 2006 that nosedived in Chicago a few summers ago and has resurfaced on the West End to see another day.Refitted with a largely fresh creative team, the show ticks all the boxes that devotees of the movie will want and expect, while never really establishing a reason for being of its own, as Kinky Boots, from the same director (Jerry Mitchell), managed so triumphantly some while back.Mitchell's latest has a vaguely Primark feel where it ought to feel haute couture Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a loner, too intense to huddle with the geeks, too stubborn to avoid the fights with the jocks, and his mother won’t tell him anything about his absent father. Who turns out to be a Greek god. Could happen to any kid. It’s that blend of familiar anxieties and fantastical backstory that propelled Rick Riordan’s bedtime stories into novels, films, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Watching Dan McCabe’s 2019 play, older folk might be reminded of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s indelible lyrics, “Can blue men sing the whites, or are they hypocrites…?” The Purists moves the question into the 21st century in a teasing but very enjoyable way.Clearly McCabe has dodged the attention of the cultural appropriation monitors here, a young white man daring to write about hiphop, seemingly a passion of his. His play tags a weightier form of cultural appropriation: the incursion of capitalism into the world of emcees and rap battles, where the enemy is seen as the mighty record Read more ...
Mark Kidel
FaithNYC is a vehicle for the singer and songwriter Felice Rosser, an original rooted in reggae,soul, punk and the New York downtown avant-garde. She once played in an all-woman reggae band, Sistren, and was a close friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat.Rosser is very fortunate in having teamed up with producer Justin Adams, the British guitarist whose music takes many different shapes, from blues to Moroccan trance music, and most of all a rare gift for collaboration, which ranges from the Gambian fiddle player Juldeh Camara and the Puglian singer, violinist and tambourine virtuoso Mauro Durante, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Not just a backstage musical, a backroom musical!In the 70s, Follies and A Chorus Line took us into the rehearsal room giving us a chance to look under the bonnet to see the cogs of the Musical Theatre machine bump and grind as a show gets on its feet. But what of the other room, the writers’ room, where the ideas emerge mistily and the egos clang in conflict? [title of show] pulls back the curtain behind the curtain, behind the curtain.“More meta?” I hear you ask, a little wince in the voice. But, rather than an exercise in smartypants critiquing of cultural production from the inside-out ( Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Towards the end of the last century, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar made a run of screwball comedies, starting with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), and ending with All About My Mother (1999), that were full of life, language and the aberrant behaviour of strong female characters.In his new movie, The Room Next Door, his first full-length feature in English – adapted from the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez – the two main characters are once again a pair of indomitable women facing up to a crisis, but somehow both Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Merchant bankers then eh? It’s not a slang term of abuse for nothing, as the middlemen collecting the crumbs off the cake (in Sherman McCoy’’s analogy from The Bonfire of the Vanities) have a reputation for living high on the hog off the ideas and industry of others. They’re the typess who might work as a subject for a cynical musical, but in a straight drama?Stefano Massini's play, adapted by Ben Power, never quite loses that vacuum at its centre, as it tells the story of The American Dream for the umpteenth time, sidestepping some inconvenient truths (also for the umpteenth time), while Read more ...