Reviews
Karen Krizanovich
It’s Gambit in name only. Producer Mike Lobell struggled for 14 years to bring the remake of this beloved caper to the big screen. In so doing, he has broken the new rule of Hollywood: Thou Shalt Not Remake Something Good, especially if you’ve gutted and purged the original story from its redolently good title.The 1966 version of Gambit was written by experienced scribes Jack Davies and Alvin Sargent (the latter also penned The Amazing Spider-Man of 2012), based on a story by the ever popular TV writer Sidney Carroll. It starred Shirley Maclaine, Michael Caine and Herbert Lom and was one of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An expert cast delivers on their promise in Aleksei Arbuzov's triangular Russian drama from 1965 of the same name, which offers up war and peace and the shifting tides of love. There's so much of the last, in fact, that Alex Sims's production at times plays out like Design For Living set against a soundscape of shelling and the occasional nod to Hitler and Stalin. Spanning more than 17 years in the lives of two men and a woman who survive the ravages of war only to face the separate ambush that comes with passion, the play transcends its soupier soap operatics thanks chiefly to the Read more ...
james.woodall
Batsheva Dance Company is reaching its half-century, which makes it, as one of the world’s leading dance brands, not quite as old – or as young – as Israel, but Martha Graham helped launch it several years before the 1967 Six Day War. An international mix, it is in fact two companies, the senior one and the Ensemble, currently touring Britain and made up of youngsters who might or might not graduate to the main, Tel Aviv-based troupe. Ohad Naharin has been in charge since 1990, which was also when the junior fraction was created.Naharin’s choreography is inventive, funny, self-interrogative, Read more ...
Tim Woodall
Squeezing nearly 300 events into the 10-day dash that is the London Jazz Festival, which has just ended required dozens of venues – many not regular presenters of jazz – to open their doors. From the 606 Club in the west to Oliver’s Bar in Greenwich in the east, the Finchley Arts Depot in the north to the Hideaway down south in Streatham, it is in the pubs, clubs and community venues of London that the jazz festival’s heart beats.The fringe also better reflects the continuing internationalisation of the London Jazz Festival. Where the Southbank and Barbican tend to present the American and Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
Those of us growing up in the heady days of 1960s Liverpool knew that four local lads were taking the world by storm. Some really grown-up people might even have been to The Cavern and seen the phenomenon in their early days. And yet there was always an enigma in the background: the figure who made it happen but about whom we knew almost nothing.Brian Epstein – pronounced Epsteen – seemed to have it all: wealth, good looks, ability, contacts. He was the gifted businessman who launched several epic popular music careers, not to mention a major music business in Liverpool which continued well Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With a reputation as the prince of unflinching emotional catharsis, Kenneth MacMillan emerged from the Royal Ballet’s triple bill marking the 20th anniversary of his death as a lord of lyricism. The new bill presents MacMillan three ways, his academic instincts, intellectual imagination and emotional vision - a bold versatility you (whisper it) almost never see from today's choreographers. And it was a surprise that the most heart-felt performance came in the elegiac melancholy of his ballet Requiem, commemorating his own death quite as evocatively as it must have originally lamented that of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Something new is happening in the West End. Just up the road from Thriller and down a bit from Les Misérables a billboard the colour of weak tea (positively consumptive compared to the full-colour, neon assaults on either side) proclaims the arrival of Richard III and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is back on Shaftesbury Avenue, and this time he means business – big, commercial business. How has this sleight of hand been achieved? Five words: Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry.With national fervour still fresh and raw in this Olympic year, and audiences still coming down from the high of Branagh’s Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Gig-going in the winter can be a difficult business. Plummeting temperatures call for layers, thick coats and scarves - none of which are easily stowed away at your average club show. As the venue starts to fill up with similarly clad bodies the place gets sweatier and sweatier, but by the time you realise you really should have coughed up a couple of quid and the extra wait for the cloakroom you’re probably already hemmed in.It comes as something of a relief then that, following two support acts (Jim Lockey and the Solemn Sun, followed by Tim Barry, who played a jolly little song about a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s something of a fashion at the moment for countertenors to break out of the baroque, to have a bit of a fling with classical and even romantic repertoire. David Daniels has experimented with Berlioz, Philippe Jaroussky has flirted as only a Frenchman can with the mélodies of Massenet and Hahn, and now Andreas Scholl is embracing his native lieder. A concert last night at the Wigmore Hall took his latest disc on the road, stripping the singer of the safety of the recording studio and letting his audience judge his latest, and in some ways most ambitious, programme for themselves.The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The horror, the horror. Primetime television tends to give a wide berth to things that go bump in the night. However reliable a low-budget option for budding indie filmmakers, the chills are not multiplying on the small screen. There’s no need to call in a special spookologist to work out why. Horror has its own demographic, which won’t tend to curl up on the sofa of a Sunday night for a cosy hour of creaks and shrieks. So The Secret of Crickley Hall, which has slung on a white sheet and crept into the nation’s living room, is a bit of collector’s item.Adapted by Joe Ahearne (who also directs Read more ...
garth.cartwright
As Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister heads towards his 67th birthday does he ever reflect on the strange and fabulous journey his 50 years as a professional musician have taken? I doubt it – navel gazing not being something Stoke On Trent’s most famous son is known for indulging in. Yet this fierce pensioner has worked his way from grafting on the 1960s Northern working men’s clubs circuit as guitarist with The Rockin’ Vicars through roadie for Jimi Hendrix to providing hippie blowhards Hawkwind with their most memorable moments then forming Motörhead only to find that punk’s toilet clubs were the only Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Zipping her trousers while coming out of a toilet cubicle, Sarah Lund continues the phone conversation that was on-going while she was in there. Making for a sink to wash her hands, she ignores the puppyish man trying to attract her attention. Nothing is going to distract Chief Inspector Lund, whether it’s the call of nature or the new police kid on the block.The third and final series of The Killing doesn’t begin exactly like the second, with Sofie Gråbøl’s Lund marking time checking what comes off ships arriving in Denmark. Instead, we find her in another sort of holding pattern. On her Read more ...