Reviews
stephen.walsh
Her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, Mariame Clément grumbles in the Glyndebourne programme that Don Pasquale “poses no specific ‘conceptual’ challenge” to the opera director. Sighs of relief all round. Donizetti’s final comic masterpiece turns out to be “about” nothing but its own subtly nuanced retelling of the stock tale of the old buffer who plans to marry his ward, nephew’s sweetheart, or some such, but is outwitted by her with the help of a smart confederate. But that, it also emerges in Clément’s witty and intelligent production first staged on the tour two years ago but new now to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just three Cornettos: the trilogy accidentally named after an ice cream concludes here. Previously in the imaginations of actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright, London has been invaded by zombies and a quiet English village by organised crime. In The World’s End, it’s the turn of a faceless Home Counties feeder town to fall under the influence of yet another B movie sub-genre. In this case the local population is replaced by robots (although what precisely constitutes a robot is one of the film’s fun running gags).Is there just a hint of weariness as Pegg, Wright and faithful lumpen co- Read more ...
David Nice
A second visit to hear this already great young Russian pianist in six months was meant for private pleasure only. Yet no-one in the Wigmore Hall audience last night, I’ll hazard a guess, will ever have heard Liszt playing like Sudbin’s in a first half which itself merited a standing ovation, so the world needs to know about it.So many Liszt interpreters give us a too-many-notes feeling of rapid indigestion, a heaviness like the hot, humid, blanched days we’ve had recently. Sudbin’s playing was like yesterday’s happier summer evening, all clear colours with a cooling wind, in the recital’s Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Last night the “freaky” Devendra Banhart didn’t make an appearance. No songs were performed cross-legged, nor were there any wig-outs. For the majority of the evening the 32-year-old American-Venezuelan hippy was, by his standards, practically understated. In keeping with his new album, Mala, he chose to emphasise songwriting over personality. For those of us who were beginning to lose faith in him, it all came as something of a relief.At the beginning of Banhart’s psychedelic-folk career, the tall singer’s exotic approach led many to consider him a wunderkind. His imagination was wild and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Anniversary years are essential to classical music, shaking up our regular rhythms of programming and listening every year with new emphasis and new discoveries. While Britten, Wagner and Verdi have all had their moments in 2013, it is Witold Lutosławski who may yet emerge as the unlikely hero. Last night his exquisitely stark Cello Concerto held its own against a major Adès premiere, itself written in memory of the elder composer – surely one of the 20th century’s neglected greats.The Cello Concerto isn’t folk-charming like the Concerto for Orchestra or sensuously appealing like the Third Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A decaying London outpost of the Hollywood movie-making machine, where dreams are spun on celluloid, and reality and fantasy intertwine in a nightmarish danse macabre of desperation and dark desire... that’s the concept behind this new immersive piece by the acclaimed site-specific innovators Punchdrunk. In execution, the experience is rather less mesmerising.Punchdrunk – for the uninitiated – have pioneered an interactive form of theatre that transforms unlikely found spaces with meticulously detailed, epic designs. Through these atmospheric, often sinister and unsettling hidden worlds, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Frozen Ground, the debut feature of New Zealand director Scott Walker, takes place in Alaska in the 1980s. Based on a true story, it tells of cop Jack Halcombe (Nicolas Cage), who teams up with prostitute Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens) to try and stop Jack Hansen (John Cusack) from killing again.Although mostly a standard issue police thriller, The Frozen Ground has some nicely balanced performances. Cage is allowed the weight and concern that his character, the dogged cop, requires. Hudgens tries a bit too hard in her role as the young mouthy prostitute, while Cusack is a little too Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Samantha Urbani is one of the sassiest frontwomen in all pop, a sexy, feline creature whose polyamorous lifestyle fuels her lyrics and adds to her projected sensuality. She sits outside Brighton seafront venue Coalition, watching water-skiers ride the mill pond sea in balmy summer heat, but one whisper from a bandmate in her ear and she's onstage within a minute, attacking opening song "Shattered". She wears a faded denim jacket with a yin-yang logo on the back, a white New York baseball cap, hot pant shorts with bulbous gold trim and a necklace of giant ersatz pearls. Behind her a large LED Read more ...
David Nice
No theatre in London, surely, has offered us more miracles of transformed space than the Young Vic. Small it may be, but its productions often feel big in every way, and none more so than Joe Wright’s total-theatre take on Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo. Enter the auditorium and designer Lizzie Clachan immediately places you – in all but the humidity, which doesn’t seep through from outside – on a street or square in Kinshasa, quickly taking you back to its former status as colonial Léopoldville in 1955 where Patrice Lumumba is selling beer. None of this would work, though, if it weren’ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Christopher Guest and his group of players have been responsible for some of the funniest, driest comedy films of the past 30 years, including Waiting For Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and, of course, his masterpiece This Is Spinal Tap, in which he played the tight-trousered guitarist Nigel Tufnel. Now he's directed and co-created (with Jim Piddock) Family Tree, a US-British sitcom first shown on HBO in America.Like most of Guest's work, the mockumentary sitcom is improvised by the cast and it centres on Irish actor Chris O'Dowd's Tom Chadwick, a 30-year-old unemployed claims assessor Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the independent cinema world, the question of where exactly a director hopes to find his or her audience never goes away. On home ground? Around the international festival circuit? Or in a lucky combination of the two, when a film resounds both locally and beyond its native land? It was always going to be a tricky issue for Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, the first full-length feature to come out of Saudi Arabia, where cinemas simply do not exist – they are banned. And the fact that it's a woman director who has set the Saudi film industry in motion challenges further our expectations of Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A joyful noise? Hell, yes. Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning 1982 feminist novel set in Georgia and spanning more than 30 years is crammed with suffering, injustice and cruelty. But in its characters’ journeys towards a realisation of identity – racial, sexual, spiritual – it is glorious. This musical based on the book received a lukewarm response on Broadway, where it opened in 2005, and admittedly it has its faults. The music isn’t unfailingly original or stirring; the lyrics are sometimes workaday and mostly literal. But in John Doyle’s stringently stripped-back production, the flaws somehow Read more ...