Reviews
edward.seckerson
The names have been changed to protect the guilty but half the fun of I Can’t Sing! - the so-called X-Factor musical - lies in the relentless spoofing of a show we love to hate and a format so unremittingly predictable that its contestants, judges, and host now read like characters from a, well, musical. Put Harry Hill on the job and you know he’s going to throw enough gags at the subject for at least a handful to stick and were this an anarchic fringe offering with a cast of six and a budget low enough to render it inventive by necessity then you’d have more chance of leaving the venue with Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Goldfrapp have already toured new album, Tales of Us, having hit the road in the UK and Europe last autumn. However, they are back for some more and on the first date of the spring leg of their live shows, Alison Goldfrapp and her five-strong backing band take to the stage at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall as the spoken introduction to Peter and the Wolf fades out with “Are you comfortable? Then let us begin.” Gone, it seems, are the clown, Marlene Dietrich and military kitsch of previous tours, as the tastefully black-clad group opened with “Jo” and slipped straight into the magic realism- Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When three good choreographers can’t get a ballet right, there must be something wrong with either the story or the music. In the case of the Prince of the Pagodas (a Poirot mystery waiting to be written, that, but I digress), it’s hardly the music: Benjamin Britten’s gamelan-leavened, melodic score, his only for a ballet, is compelling. Of course, it hardly serves up Classic FM-worthy five-minute flower waltzes à la Tchaikovsky, Adam, Minkus et al, but then neither does Prokofiev’s Cinderella and that has no problem getting produced.So, story then. Both John Cranko in his 1957 original and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
How do you explore extremes of feeling on stage? In cult pen-master Philip Ridley’s new play, a 75-minute monologue that won plaudits in Edinburgh last year, he takes us by the hand and throws us into a universe of pain. His mouthpiece is comedian and actor Gemma Whelan — who plays Yara Greyjoy of the television series Game of Thrones — and is now Andrea, a 15-year-old from the East End of London who is groomed for sex by an older man.Andrea and her friend Emma are a couple of teenagers whose upbringing has not encouraged them to bask in the warming sunlight of good self-esteem. On the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Just before the curtain came up for the second half of Fatal Attraction, a chap sitting behind me told his companion, “All I remember is that it ends quite badly.” It may seem like a cheap shot, from me, but the comment was apposite in so many ways, not least because the reason for this misbegotten production’s very existence is a writer’s desire to change his ending.James Dearden’s biggest claim to fame is as the screenwriter of the 1987 big screen potboiler – and, of course, bunny boiler – about a man made to suffer for his adultery, when his one-night stand turns out to be a psychotic Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the new indoor Jacobean theatre at The Globe, is an absolute jewel of painstaking historical research and craftsmanship. It is small, seating around 350, and with its thrust stage lit by around 100 candles (with electric light only on the musicians’ gallery in this performance), it is a challenging space to put on an opera, but also a uniquely atmospheric one.It many ways this Royal Opera/Shakespeare’s Globe co-production is experimental, with everyone involved having to learn from scratch how to work within these limitations, and also what opportunities for Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's not often we're told to strap ourselves in for a drama - it takes quite some skill to make the everyday excite and to make ordinary lives seem extraordinary, but these are gifts that the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has in abundance. His talent for meticulously structured, thriller-tense narratives, for coming at stories from an interesting angle (conducive to creating and capturing emotional charge) couldn't even be ignored by the Academy, who recognised 2011's A Separation outside the (niche) world cinema category, with an Oscar nomination for its screenplay alongside the gong Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps the BBC didn't need to make W1A, its new self-satirising sitcom. In the clerical comedy Rev, the Church of England could be considered a very serviceable metaphor for the Corporation, with its unfathomable layers of bureaucracy, well-meaning but slightly pitiable niceness, a self-image that belongs to a forgotten century, and self-flagellation before other cultures. Though the BBC does have rather more money to spend.In this series three opener, the Rev Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander) became a new father, after his wife Alex (Olivia Colman) had very nearly given birth in the back of Read more ...
James Williams
There was something of a Canadian invasion at the O2 last night, but this is about as far from lumberjacks and mounties as it comes. Abel Tesfaye, better known as the Weeknd, is getting straight to the point. “I want to get on top, London!” This may of course simply be a metaphor for his and mentor Drake’s meteoric rise to fame, but Tesfaye does seem to like saying naughty things.All sleaze aside, though, his sleek, futuristic brand of R&B tonight is bolstered by a backing band of considerable talent, making songs from his recent Kiss Land project sizzle and pop in the cavernous O2 arena Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Initiating the tercentenary of the arrival of the Hanoverians and thus the foundation of our German royal family, this startling and beguiling exhibition of the work of the polymath William Kent (1685-1748) crams 200 objects – drawings, paintings, plans, photographs, furniture, illustrations, models – into an illusionistic array of gauzy rooms, evocative of real interiors. The profusion is deliberate. Long before art nouveau, Kent’s interiors left no surface without rich ornament. His own admirations are clear; the exhibition shows us at its very beginning marble busts modelled Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jon Robin Baitz learnt his craft writing on big American television shows including The West Wing and he created Brothers & Sisters, and Other Desert Cities - his first Broadway play - is another family drama with a political edge. The title comes from the signs saying “Palm Springs/Other Desert Cities” on motorways leading into the Coachella Valley, a vast sprawl of nine cities that have a profusion of resort hotels, spas and golf courses. A two-hour drive from Los Angeles, the area is both a playground for Angelenos, and the place where many choose to live when they retire.So Read more ...
Andy Plaice
It was something of a relief when the police were finally alerted to the sinister motives of Malcolm Webster in last night’s second episode of The Widower. ITV’s three-part dramatisation of the killer’s exploits (he was convicted in 2011 of murdering his first wife and trying to kill his second) raises interesting questions not only concerning how we tell stories about crimes from real-life, but whether we actually tell them at all.Part One had ended with Webster's first wife dead following the staging of a car crash. Malcolm had miraculously survived as the vehicle started to burn, but Read more ...