Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Family: Once Upon a TimeFamily were always difficult to place. This lavish box set doesn’t make getting a handle on them any easier. They were as idiosyncratic as Jethro Tull and, in Roger Chapman, had a vocalist as offbeat as Joe Cocker. Not that they sounded like either, more that their DNA was as sharp-edged as both. The Leicester-born band had roots in soul-pop outfit The Farinas and the psychedelic underground embraced them – they were integral to the 1969 novel Groupie, a lid-lifting, supposedly fictional, exposé of rock’s seamier side. Despite these leg-ups and their popularity, they Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How do you solve a problem like Medea? Euripides’ baby-killing, hell-invoking sorceress is one of literature’s most terrifying and unfathomable creations – a woman capable of murdering her own children just to watch their father’s pain. Yet with the blood on her hands now centuries-old, Medea continues to work her grim enchantments on artists. No fewer than eight operas (and an almost equal number of plays) have staged her story, but have any really got to grips with the psychology of tragedy’s wickedest witch? I’m afraid that Georg Benda’s 1775 Medea is unknown to me, as is Saverio Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Last week Lulu, this week Cio-Cio San, next week the Vixen Bystrouška. These are the three exemplars of David Pountney’s “Free Spirits” – as he labels his first themed season with WNO. But it’s hard to see poor little Butterfly, pinned to a board by the cruel American sailor-lepidopterist, as a free anything. Like a trapped fly, Suzuki calls her; and if there’s a free spirit in Puccini’s opera, it might rather be Pinkerton himself, “dropping anchor at random,” as he boasts to Sharpless: not such an inspiring thought.Joachim Herz’s production, now 35 years old, was rough and aggressive when Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The great German-born director Max Ophüls admired Goethe, Stendhal, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, and the four films he made in France, following his unfulfilling post-war sojourn in Hollywood, are characterised by supreme literary elegance and wit. Their prime subject is the transient nature of love and the particular sorrow of women. His elaborate tracking shots and bravura pans are brilliantly harnessed to mirror the inexorability with which emotions alter over time.Changing critical tastes haven’t been especially kind to La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de… (1953), and Read more ...
graham.rickson
“All we do is talk!” complains the unnamed protagonist in Poulenc’s brilliantly concise one-act opera La Voix Humaine, a faithful setting from late on in the composer’s career of Cocteau’s 1930 play. Banter is what you don’t get; the heroine’s dialogue with her former lover is conducted via an unreliable landline. The audience hears only one side of the conversation. It’s a chilling, emotionally charged piece – though the latent naturalism is slightly undercut by the unseen presence of a full orchestra underscoring every move.Poulenc’s irrepressible warmth and melodic gifts are largely Read more ...
james.woodall
Big hitters have graced Berlin, with the festival now reaching its close - Damon, Huppert and Binoche have been and gone, Deneuve is yet to come - but one of the more anticipated visits this week was Steven Soderbergh’s. He has said that Side Effects will be his last feature as he “retires” at 50.If he’s really putting himself out to grass, this slick thriller is an impressive last testament. Jude Law plays psychiatrist Jonathan Banks, who's drawn into murky money and labyrinthine deception as he tries to deal with a patient, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), who seems to “forget” Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not a bad idea for a series, even if it is a tiny bit Boardwalk Empire Goes to Nevada. In short: whoosh back to the early Sixties and poke about in the wild and lawless underbelly of Las Vegas, a city awash with debauchery and corruption and under the thumb of the Mob. Better still, the show was created by Nicholas Pilleggi, screenwriter for Martin Scorsese's gangster flicks Goodfellas and Casino.Vegas is based on the true story of Sheriff Ralph Lamb, who aimed to tame the hookers, hustlers, hitmen and hucksters who helped make Sin City such a fun destination. Lamb is given some movie star Read more ...
David Nice
I laughed quite a bit going round the exhibition to which the Barbican’s latest theatre events are tied, The Bride and the Bachelors. Pioneer Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 “Readymade” Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy? is funny in itself: a metal birdcage containing marble sugarcubes with a cuttle bone and a thermometer stuck through the bars. It’s even funnier when you learn that admirer Robert Rauschenberg, about to pinch a couple of cubes on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the late 1950s, was told by the guard, “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch that crap?” I laughed a lot, too, Read more ...
Simon Munk
The gnashing teeth emerging from a slathering black mouth ‑ HR Giger and Ridley Scott's Alien design remains one of the most horrific creations of cinema: an iconic image of vagina dentata body horror and a genetically modified unstoppable bogeyman for a modern age. The film was no one-off, however.James Cameron's Aliens sequel successfully replaced the horror tropes with incredibly tense and visceral action, while more recently Prometheus added epic scale. Even in games, Aliens Vs. Predator (in 2000) delivered a brilliant sense of enclosed fear. Given the series' heritage and mixture of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a time, a couple of aeons back, when Bruce Willis wanted to get in touch with his thespian side. Tinseltown kept casting him, he complained, as rubberised lunks rippled in gore (pictured below) who always revert to the vertical after yet another drubbing. But that was then. And this is 25 years on from Die Hard's first outing: the day A Good Day to Die Hard makes it five.The joke of the Die Hard/Harder/Hardest franchise is that a comic-book cop takes a battering as he goes about the important business of deleting scumbags at the point of a machine gun. The villains, as villains will Read more ...
David Nice
It's odd that Jerry Herman merits only a passing mention in Stephen Sondheim's two-volume autobiographical take on Broadway words and music, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. In a couple of subjects Herman chose no less daringly than the master. Yet while La Cage aux Folles is now so entrenched that we forget its original boldness in asserting a loving gay relationship, Dear World's eccentric mix of eco-plea and nostalgia has yet to be established as a bittersweet chamber piece.Where it only took Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along 11 years to progress from flop to classic, Dear Read more ...
howard.male
The only time the great Malian singer spoke at any length to last night’s audience was when he said, “I don’t know my birthday. I don’t know the day or the year. So any day can be my birthday. So can you please stand up and dance for my birthday.” So either Wikipedia is wrong about it being 25 August 1949, or Keita has a strange sense of humour. Anyway, his presumably oft-repeated line gets a warm chuckle of appreciation and a third of the audience dutifully get to their feet.In other respects too this was an oddly dissatisfying gig. Keita’s new album Talé is a muscular pop/funk workout which Read more ...