Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Fans of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels are spitting feathers that their fictional hero is being played by Tom Cruise. This is not least because in the books, Reacher is a hulking fellow built like a giant redwood with fists the size of dustbins (he's six foot five and 250 pounds). And probably not a Scientologist. Tom is 5'7" and weighs practically nothing.But as ever, the obsessive Cruise has gone into the project with beady-eyed gung-ho-ness, and if he doesn't measure up to anyone's ideal of Reacherhood, there's no doubting his energy and commitment. At 50, he's been putting in Read more ...
David Nice
Messiahs of all kinds multiply at this time of year: the meek and the threadbare as well as the proud and polished. On the Sunday before Christmas, it was hard to choose between two potential archangels who could hardly fail given their respective pedigrees. It may have initially come down to a choice between single star soloists, soprano of the year Sophie Bevan at the Wigmore or flawless countertenor Iestyn Davies (pictured below by Marco Borggreve) at St John’s. As it turned out the entire team at Smith Square, crowning a week of top-quality choral concerts which had included Bach's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Joyce Hatto achieved a rare kind of immortality for being the pianist at the centre of an audacious classical music fraud, in which her husband faked "Joyce Hatto" CDs from the work of other artists and, for a time, enjoyed considerable success with them. The Hatto goose was cooked when the Gracenote music database used by iTunes detected that one of her albums was not her work at all.A couple of novels based on Hatto-like events have already appeared, but for this TV treatment, writer Victoria Wood stuck to the couple's real-life story, though she had clearly allowed herself plenty of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Begins – The Flying Dutchman MastersKieron TylerThis fine box set has a cuckoo in its nest which has to be dealt with instantly. Like Eric Clapton’s 1976 declaration of support for Enoch Powell, Scott-Heron’s “The Subject Was Faggots” is a blot that’s hard to erase from a career otherwise marked by inclusivity. “Giggling and grinning and prancing and shit… faggots who were balling because they couldn't get their balls inside the faggot hall,” is how it goes, with Scott-Heron plumping for “he, she or it” as his favoured signifier. Yeah, times were different, the Read more ...
Laura Silverman
"Doors and sardines. Getting on, getting off. Getting the sardines on, getting the sardines off. That's farce. That's the theatre. That's life." So says one of Michael Frayn's characters in Noises Off. In Sam Walters's giddy revival of Georges Feydeau's classic farce, written almost a century earlier, the doors are imaginary (forget about the sardines.) Characters make plentiful entrances and exits, but as the Orange Tree is in the round, doors on set would present a logistical nightmare. Instead, actors mime opening and closing them, while the stage manager makes accompanying knocks and Read more ...
carole.woddis
If you have any young siblings, friends or relatives in need of burning off a little energy, send them directly to BAC. With their open-hearted style of rough, circusy-type theatre, Kneehigh are ideally suited to this circular barn of a room. Taking Cinderella and adapting it to their own special brand of popular theatre, Emma Rice, Mike Shepherd and the company have come up with a ridiculously raucous production, a seemingly ungoverned but highly controlled piece of Christmas chaos that couldn’t be the success it is without the skill and talent of a company who make it all look so Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Cinemagoers with an aversion to musicals need not fear, as in Pitch Perfect most of the singing is in a sane context, rather than its characters breaking into lavish routines in the street. After the fun but exhaustingly naff Rock of Ages, this comes as something of a relief. And if its chart pop mash-ups and campus antics seem squarely targeted at the teenage and twenty-something market, Pitch Perfect broadens its appeal shrewdly with some cross-generational acerbic and offbeat humour.The first thing Pitch Perfect gets right is its cast. Oscar and Tony nominated actress Anna Kendrick ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's nothing like a dame, as any panto fan knows. Michael Grade's enjoyable history of the pantomime Dame was shot through with affection as well as a deep knowledge of the subject, as befits a member of one of variety's most influential families and someone who fell in love with the artform at his first pantomime, in which his aunt Kathy was performing as principal boy, when he was just a young lad.Pantomime has a rich history of its own, with commedia dell'arte among its antecedents, and even if there are those who despise its popularity and commercial success, they should remember that Read more ...
Helen K Parker
In the world of gaming there are many pioneers, but it is those uninhibited by the constraints of the uber-publishers who have the true freedom to experiment, excel and evolve their art form. It is from the PC diaspora that the most innovative games are coming, where game-makers are limited only by their imaginations. And RAM. And processor speed. And graphics cards.Out this month is one of these innovations. Perspective describes itself as an "experimental first-person perception puzzle game" which utilises two different dimensions in order to create and play around with – you guessed it - Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Valery Gergiev’s exploration of the music of Karol Szymanowski is one of the most vitalising series mounted at the Barbican in recent years - to compare, say, with Sir Colin Davis’s Sibelius and Berlioz, Michael Tilson Thomas’s tributes to Leonard Bernstein, or Gergiev’s own Shostakovich and (increasingly) Prokofiev.The first point, and Gergiev himself is in no doubt about this, is that Szymanowski belongs right up there with the best of them. An uncredited introductory note (the others, pithy and perceptive, are by Polish-Russian specialist Adrian Thomas) rightly points out that Szymanowski Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Plaudits to ITV for their recent campaign of new drama, even if the results have been patchy. The best ones have been well worth persevering with, and The Bletchley Circle and Tony Marchant's Leaving have wedged themselves most firmly in the mind.So where does The Town fit in? Well, it would have had a better chance of evolving into something truly memorable if it had been given more than three episodes, and the curse of the short series has become the scourge of British TV drama on whatever channel. Interestingly, the makers of The Killing argue that it's actually cheaper to make longer Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“How I do love a steely sting in my fairytale ending,” croons Meow Meow, eyes glinting even more brilliantly than her eyeshadow. When she says “sting” a whole army of scorpions couldn’t equal her venom. As the title of this veteran “kamikaze cabaret” artist’s show makes clear, Meow Meow’s The Little Match Girl is an entirely idiosyncratic take on Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story, a piece of iconoclastic, bra-baring (if not actually burning) revisionist theatre – a “73-minute showbiz extravaganza on child poverty and social disenfranchisement.” Phew.It sounds like a lot to pack into Read more ...