Reviews
Laura Silverman
Alan Ayckbourn refuses to write down to children, and it shows. The Boy Who Fell into a Book is as sophisticated in structure as it is family-friendly in content. The narrative follows nine-year-old Kevin, who is absorbed (literally) into the detective story he is reading: Rockfist and the Green Shark. Kevin dreams he has joined Rockfist on his latest case, in which they must discover the identity of the shark to save the planet, although the investigation is secondary to the inventive episodes along the way as the pair slip through the books on Kevin's shelf – Chess for Beginners, Grimm's Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Cult figures from rock music’s golden age are numinous today but few are more obscure than Sixto Rodriguez. The Mexican-American singer-songwriter released two albums on Sussex Records in 1970 and ’71. In the US they were quickly deleted and he seemingly vanished. Only a handful of crate-digging acolytes valued these albums, the first of which, Cold Fact, opened with "Sugar Man", a haunting ode to a drug dealer.In the age of Mojo (ie the late 1990s) Rodriguez began to be championed, his albums were reissued David Holmes put "Sugar Man" on one of his compilations, Nas sampled this same tune Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Forget the ages-old talk of London buses arranging their schedules so that they all arrive at once. The capital's patterns of public transport have nothing on the rapidity with which Henry V has hoved into view of late, whether at Shakespeare's Globe, on tour from the all-male Propeller company, in repertory at Islington's Old Red Lion pub theatre or as a baleful conclusion to the BBC's impressive Hollow Crown series of the Bard-on-film. And one thing seems certain after this most recent version: a play often renowned for its braying jingoism has rarely seemed so mournful, as if the " Read more ...
howard.male
What function does a critic even serve at an event like this? Some of the best Colombian musicians across several generations are playing some of the best music Colombia has ever produced to an audience that largely consists of blissfully happy Colombians on Colombian Independence Day. But before the party got into its stride there’s a non-Colombian support band to consider. And consider them we must, because Ghanaian Afro-funk band Konkoma were as coolly polished and insidiously funky as the headline act.Like Ondatrópica they take much of their inspiration from the dance music of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Blur: 21Bruce DessauThe recent closure of Word magazine has been seen by some as linked to the demise of "Fifty Quid Man". Who can afford such a wallet-frightening splurge these days on the kind of music the monthly's writers wrote so eloquently about? Well, have a chat with your friendly bank manager because this lavish tribute to the winners of the Britpop long game retails at £134.99 and is just about worth it. Every stage of Blur’s career is here – apart from, annoyingly, one their recent new tracks, "The Puritan" – charting the band's evolution from pre-Madchester incarnation Seymour to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Last night was meant to be a celebration of Beethoven and Barenboim. But we had a gatecrasher. And at the opening concert of the first cycle of the Beethoven symphonies at the Proms for 60 years, the name on everyone's lips was neither Beethoven nor Daniel Barenboim, but that of Pierre Boulez. Though modest in its manner of musical expression, the near 50 minutes of continuous music that make up Boulez's chamber work Dérive 2 dwarfed the two Beethoven symphonies that stood either side of it and dominated the tone of evening. There was bafflement from some in the audience, wide-eyed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where on earth do you begin if all the world’s a stage? When not sifting through the entrails of dynastic English history or sunning themselves in Italy, the plays of Shakespeare really do put a girdle round the known globe. They send postcards from the exotic neverlands of Illyria and Bohemia, wander deep into Asia, set foot as far south as Africa, trespass up to the chilly north of Scandinavia and Scotland, and even make reference to Muscovy. And of course there are the Anthropophagi (wherever they're from). To map this world is something only the British Museum, that most capacious cabinet Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Sellars has a talent for controversy, from his early days when he was the director who brought you Così fan tutte set in a diner on Cape Cod, Don Giovanni as a cocaine-snorting, Big Mac-eating slum thug, and Figaro getting married in Trump Tower. At his best, in John Adams's Nixon in China, Saariaho’s L’amour du loin, or his Teodora at Glyndebourne, the results have been some of the freshest and most inspiring stagings of new music seen in recent times. Anyone who has met him knows he is a brilliant polymath, extremely charming and charismatic, even if many hate his haircut (see Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Purcell certainly doesn’t make it easy for the champions of English opera. His beloved Dido and Aeneas is barely half an evening’s entertainment, so condensed is its tragedy, and the dense political satire of Dryden’s King Arthur text all but requires translation if it is to make sense to a contemporary audience. And then there’s The Fairy Queen – the gauzy, gorgeous semi-opera whose music is the side-dish to a bastardised 17th-century take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.With Purcell’s music for the latter valued above its rhyming-couplet dialogue, it’s rare to see the work today Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach, Beethoven, Schubert Reiko Fujisawa (piano) (Quartz)Each of these three composers makes very specific, particular demands on a pianist’s technique. Playing Bach as sharply and as delicately as this doesn’t suggest that Reiko Fujisawa will be up to the mark when tackling the spongier, more amorphous world of Schubert’s Impromptus, but she’s able to inhabit both sound worlds with ease. Having a mixed programme on CD is such a rare pleasure; this is like listening to a carefully prepared live recital. The Schubert comes at the end of the disc. The major-minor shifts in the first Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The omens did not augur well for this one. Under The Bridge, a venue beneath Chelsea Football Stadium, used to be an iffy nightclub called Purple but has been redesigned by the man behind America’s House of Blues chain into a shiny visual fusion of TGI Friday's and the Hard Rock Café. Industrial girders are visible in the ceiling and the walls are plastered in top-notch rock and pop photography but, overall, there’s an ersatz, squeaky-clean vibe that’s going to take some piercing by any act who takes the stage.I turn to my right and there’s Mick Hucknall of Simply Red. What do I do? Read more ...
emma.simmonds
2012 has so far brought us a couple of notable surprises from the oft-maligned world of comic book adaptations: first came Joss Whedon’s Avengers Assemble with its boisterous banter and then there was depth and pathos from Andrew Garfield in the title role of Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man. With its key competitors faring well both critically and commercially, what of Christopher Nolan’s Caped Crusader?We last saw “the Batman” (as they insist on describing him) in 2008’s The Dark Knight taking the rap for the dastardly deeds of fallen hero Harvey Dent - providing Gotham with the martyr it Read more ...