New York
david.cheal
If the power-generating companies in the London area noticed a sudden surge in electricity consumption late on Sunday afternoon, I think I can explain why: many thousands of hair-straighteners and other beautifying devices were doubtless being put to use in the run-up to Lady Gaga’s show at the O2 Arena, the first of two nights in London. This was one of those shows that people got dressed up for, made themselves glamorous for; it was a big night out, and the result, as the O2 Arena filled up, was a sea of very straight and very shiny hair, often decorated with bows and flowers (though I also Read more ...
roslyn.sulcas
What is going on at New York City Ballet, home of the abstract, neo-classical, pared-down, no-scenery, no-story, nothing-extraneous aesthetic that George Balanchine made into an artistic religion? So far, three out of the four pieces commissioned for the company’s ambitious “Architecture of Dance” festival have been - more or less - story ballets (only Wayne McGregor has resisted the lure). Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna offered a dizzying whirl through a faux-19th-century ballet, complete with mystifying characters, impossible plot and glorious choreography. Of Benjamin Millepied’s why am I not Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There are, in urban myth, those moments when a runway model – leggy, impassively superhuman and dressed in some impossibly haute garment – catches a heel and collapses, foal-like, into a heap of fragile legs. It’s a moment that Sex and the City the series neatly turned on its head, urging us to celebrate the beauty to be found in human flaw and error; yet, watching the self-assured sass of this once-mighty franchise sprawl headlong, it wasn’t beauty but a sense of raging frustration that dominated. The fashion, the friends, even the puns are all still in their place, but where (as Carrie Read more ...
roslyn.sulcas
In the New York City Ballet’s grand tradition of ambitious festivals of new work, its current offering, Architecture of Dance, is a big, ambitious deal: seven new ballets; four of them to commissioned scores; five sporting sets by the famed architect Santiago Calatrava. Three of the works are by the men who are arguably the most exciting ballet-makers in the world right now: Alexei Ratmansky, Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon. In New York, the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer McGregor is the least-known of that trio - this is his first commission for an American company, and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to go into overdrive in May, that time of the theatrical year when New York stages are at their buzziest in the run-up to the Tony Awards (to be awarded on 13 June). Heavyweight star vehicles (Denzel Washington back on Broadway after five years in Fences) vie for audiences with London imports (Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne in Red), while musicals generate their own considerable clamour: literally so in the case of the Green Day-scored American Idiot, a 95-minute aural immersion that has prompted more delicate members of the show-going public to plump for earplugs. But amidst Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week, after a performance of Enron at the Noel Coward Theatre, I chaired a Q&A session with director Rupert Goold, writer Lucy Prebble, actor Sam West and most of the rest of the cast. What no one in the room knew then, though Goold and Prebble would have, was that at 11pm EST the show’s Broadway closure would be announced for this Sunday, only two weeks after it opened on 27 April. Enron was famously a rare beneficiary of the credit crunch. Now, at least in America, it would appear to have become a victim of it. Why? The play had been sitting on the backburner of the theatre Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The opening episode of a new series is always an awkward blighter. You have to introduce the characters and establish the required tone, while squeezing in enough plot to keep the thing moving. Even mega-budget epics like FlashForward have struggled to make it work.And then along comes episode one of White Collar, a wry drama about a FBI agent and a master thief, and suddenly everything looks sublimely easy. Casting is all, and White Collar’s twin leads have an easy rapport that makes you believe that agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) really has spent three years pursuing the mercurial Neal Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The American Classical Orchestra is generously offering to lighten the gloom of Europeans trapped by the volcanic cloud in New York (although it's hardly the worst place for an enforced stopover). This Saturday the ACO performs the climactic concert of its 25th-anniversary season at the Big Apple's Cathedral Church of St John the Divine, and any stranded European nationals will be given a free ticket if they show their passport at the door.Concert preview on YouTube
It's a rumbustious bill. It opens with Handel's Coronation Anthems, which will be adorned by 60 dancers from the Conservatory Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Laurie Anderson's new show Delusion opens at the Barbican in London next week. Since the late 1960s she has been at the forefront of artistic innovation. From early pieces where she appeared in art galleries (wearing ice-skates in a block of ice that slowly melted), to her epic opera United States I-IV, she has carved out a niche as something between a poet, artist, technician, humourist, pop star and magician. We chatted over a coffee for breakfast in Paris last week, after I had seen Delusion the previous night.Anderson's last show, Homeland, was partly a response to the fact Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How does a ballerina feel during Swan Lake? Find out instantaneously from the New York ballerina who tweets while she dances. Ashley Bouder is one of the most exciting dancers of the new generation over there - and new-generation she is.According to Gia Kourlas’s article in the New York Times today, Ashley’s iPhone is her closest partner, and her constant twittering is opening up a new understanding of a leading dance-artist’s life. So what did the Swan Queen tweet the other day as she magically flew off the stage and prepared to change into the black tutu of her wicked doppelganger? “Odette Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Jonathan Mills has announced the programme for Edinburgh International Festival 2010, on a theme of modern culture in the New Worlds of the Americas and Australasia. Ranging from California to Canberra, New York to New Zealand, from Santiago to Samoa, the festival opens on Friday 13 August with John Adams' oratorio El Niño and closes on Sunday 5 September with the traditional fireworks concert.World premieres include political writer Alistair Beaton’s exploration of Scotland’s futile attempt at establishing a colony in Panama, Caledonia, directed by Anthony Neilson and co-produced by the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In movies and on TV we expect sequels and spin-offs and the perpetuation of a franchise whereby we follow Rocky, The Terminator, or whomever seemingly to the grave. But theatre has tended to take the high road: Chekhov never revealed whether the three sisters actually reached Moscow. (What do you think?) And the nearest Beckett got to Waiting For Godot 2 are Hamm and Clov in Endgame, who can be seen as Didi and Gogo filtered through an even bleaker end of the existential prism. So the first thing to be said about Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber's sure-to-be-debated follow-on Read more ...