race issues
Katie Colombus
I have had an obsessive-loop Dixie Chicks tune for every eventuality of my life so far – “Ready To Run” for a big break up; “Wide Open Spaces” for road tripping; “Cowboy Take Me Away” for whimsical love affairs; “Not Ready To Make Nice” for general rage and “Travelin’ Soldier” for a good old cry.With the release of their 8th album, some 14 years after the last, I am wondering if there is a fitting sound for unkempt-hairy-make-up-lacking-global-pandemic-PJ-wearing-lockdown-lacklustre. And I’m delighted to say, that of course there is. Not only have the 13 time Grammy winning group produced an 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 ...
On the Record review - #MeToo turns its lens to the music industry, gives the mic to women of colour
Jill Chuah Masters
On the Record, the latest documentary from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (acclaimed directors of The Hunting Ground), dives into the sexual misconduct allegations against music mogul Russell Simmons, the so-called ‘Godfather of Hip Hop.’ It centres on interviews with Drew Dixon (pictured below), who — as a twentysomething music executive — launched Whitney Houston hits and scouted a young Kanye West. She left the industry after Simmons allegedly raped her.This is an elegant, stinging addition to the #MeToo dialogue, which gives due emphasis to black women and the music industry — a Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
A British-Jamaican man is confused. It's the Second World War, and he signed up for the RAF on the understanding that he would serve as a pilot overseas. But instead he's ended up as ground crew in a grey Lincolnshire village. "You are overseas, aren't you?" sneers his sergeant. That question – of how great the distance between Jamaica and Britain was and is – lies at the heart of Small Island, Rufus Norris's epic, big-hearted production of Andrea Levy's 2004 ode to the Windrush generation, adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson. It's also one of the reasons that the National Theatre 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 ...
Owen Richards
Only those who really love you can deliver the hard truths, and for filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, that one love is romantic comedies. Better known as one half of band Summer Camp, Sankey is a self-confessed romcom expert, having watched nearly every film from the 80s onwards. It was her happy place, but in this new visual essay on MUBI, she breaks down the huge number of problematic tropes that fill the genre.There are certain rules that nearly every romantic comedy abides by. There are the female-led films, with straight, middle-class, white women defined by their weight and career, until they Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Oliver Hermanus’ potent fourth feature Moffie certainly has a controversial film title. A homophobic slur, it can be translated from Afrikaans as "faggot". If you were to see buses with film posters emblazoned with the title in translation, there might rightly be cries of outrage.But the charged choice of title is not unwarranted. The word rings throughout the script, but without the viewer becoming desensitised to its poisonous quality. It lashes like a whip every time. The power of Hermanus’ film comes through a drama that is charged with fear and hatred. Rendered as a tense Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The National Theatre’s online broadcasts got off to a storming start with One Man, Two Guvnors – watched by over 2.5 million people, either on the night or in the week since its live streaming, and raising around £66,000 in donations. Let’s hope that engagement continues with their next offering: Sally Cookson’s dynamic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, a Bristol Old Vic and National Theatre co-production which also toured the UK.Cookson’s devised work blows past the problems associated with transferring literature to stage. There is nothing stuffy or static about her version; on the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Ever since I heard the quintessential prog rock group The Nice do a psychedelic instrumental version of “America” in 1968, I have loved this song. Later on, I was better able to appreciate Sondheim’s lyrics, whose satirical sharpness and superb inventiveness make this the definitive song about migration. Written for Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story (1957), at a time when Sondheim had never written a Broadway show of his own, it was, lyrically speaking, a fabulous debut. Robert Wise’s 1961 film version, currently available on Netflix, is likewise a great revision of the original. ( Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Since 2000, Esther Baker's Synergy Theatre Project has worked with prisoners, ex-offenders and young people at risk of offending to produce powerful dramas about some of the most fraught social situations you can imagine. The latest show, written by playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak and researched in collaboration with Prisoners Abroad, is a verbatim piece about the subject of transatlantic deportation. In the current climate of Brexit trade talks, can this show – an ideal fit for this venue – cast any light on the much-vaunted special relationship between the UK and the USA?In the American Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Burhan Qurbani isn’t the first director to bring Alfred Döblin’s seminal 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, to the screen. First, there was the Weimar Republic era adaptation that Döblin himself worked on. Fifty years later, Rainer Werner Fassbinder brought us his 15-hour television opus. Both kept to the story’s original setting, focusing on a recently released convict caught in the swirl of the criminal underground and the groundswell of Nazism and Hitler’s ascent to power. Director Burhan Qurbani, who is of Afghan heritage and born in Germany, eschews the historical setting Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Black Lives Matter movement is such an important international protest that it is odd how few contemporary plays even mention it. Since the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has been around since 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman who shot African-American teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012, there is little excuse. Now, however, New York playwright Antoinette Nwandu's allegorical play about race in America, first staged in 2018at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre (and filmed there by Spike Lee, no less), has come to this Off-West End venue, opening the day after rapper Dave Read more ...