Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
By the time she went to college to study to become a singing teacher, Joyce DiDonato had been to exactly two different American states: Kansas and Colorado. New York and San Francisco were as yet unvisited, Europe and Asia as yet undreamed of. It’s a story DiDonato herself tells with practised humour. Jump forward 20 years and there isn’t a continent or metropolitan hub unconquered by this supreme mezzo-soprano, whose career may have taken her impossibly far from her Kansas beginnings, but whose sunny, unpretentious workmanship is still pure Midwest.Last night at the Wigmore Hall it was Read more ...
bella.todd
"I can’t live without horse flesh, if it’s only a piece of cat’s meat on a skewer.” So declares Patricia Hodge’s gung-ho racing fanatic Georgina in this straight-down-the-line revival of Pinero’s 125-year-old caper, which requires cast and audience to subsist on the theatrical equivalent of the latter.A rarely-seen drawing-room comedy about a put-upon vicar tempted into risking money and reputation on a horse, Dandy Dick was partly written in Brighton and possibly inspired by its racecourse. Hence its selection to launch Theatre Royal Brighton Productions which, under artistic director Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Let’s be honest – there is no non-cynical way to justify remaking a barely 10-year-old franchise film. With a Batman “reboot” already on the cards for after Christopher Nolan ends his directing tenure with the upcoming Dark Knight Rises, and a similar fate rumoured to be in store for the Twilight saga, Hollywood seems to have embraced its inner Ouroboros and resigned itself to an infinite cycle of re-stagings.In one sense, there’s nothing especially wrong with this. Superheroes have often been compared to modern-day mythological figures, and just as we think nothing of three or four different Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Regina’s Spektor’s kooky New York piano gal shtick sure divides audiences. For every person who finds her a perfect antidote (I refuse to say adorkable) to all that’s mainstream and soulless, there is someone else who wants to punch her on the nose for singing “on the Braa-dio-uh-oh” instead of “on the radio.”Mind you, it’s not all icing sugar. She might have started her career sounding like an ad man's idea of a pixie dream girl, but time has proved she really means it. Still, it can get a bit syrupy, no? Well, last night it didn’t. Thumping out power chords and belting out slogans like “ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A drama featuring mayoral politics and an unsolved death. Hm. What’s the Danish for déjà vu? By the end of episode one of Blackout, you were wondering when Sara Lund was going to strut into the town hall in her Faroe Isles pullie and attitudinal denim, stare at people very hard and seem ever so gradually to lose the plot. Not that there’s much plot to lose in Blackout. The Killing’s belle dame sans merci could knit it up in three hours, no bother.Which is lucky because this is British television drama, where they tend to have no faith in the concept of the slow narrative burn. Three hours is Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The curtain rises onto a wall that totally blocks the view. A long silence... then, without warning, the wall collapses – to cheers of delight from the audience. For the rest of the evening, the dancers have to pick their way over rubble strewn across the middle ground that restricts free movement to strips of open space at the front and rear of the stage. It's a powerful metaphor for a society constrained by its past as well as its present; and Sicily is littered with the remains of civilisations that have disappeared leaving behind buildings stricken by earthquakes, swallowed by lava Read more ...
Nigel Williamson
Bob Dylan once described himself as ''just a song and dance man''. If the phrase was intended to debunk our veneration of him as the voice of a generation and to imply that he's just an old-fashioned entertainer in the great showbiz tradition, devotees have never believed him and have carried on seeking clues to the meaning of life in his work, campaigning for him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and generally treating his every utterance as if he's the Oracle.Yet at the Hop Farm deep in rural Kent on a cool, moonlit Saturday night, the serious artist was finally transformed into song Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A birthday offering, a wedding celebration - with that, and one further creative collaboration ahead, Dame Monica Mason makes her farewell as director of the Royal Ballet after 10 years. The last programme of favourites from the store cupboard must always be a tricky one, but true to form the mistress of the great occasion (anniversaries have been a mainstay of her programming) picked rituals and ceremonies that stressed company ethos and values.Those 10 years of her reign have been steady, stable, conservative - mostly restricted in programming to the box-office comfort zone; and while the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It seems almost a lifetime since Tom Jones was a man in very tight clothes who did well in the clubs of Las Vegas. After the fallow years, his 1988 cover of Prince’s “Kiss” kick-started a tongue-in-cheek rehabilitation period that lasted a decade, right up to the unforgettable “whoowauh!” of “Sex Bomb”. But what happened next surprised everyone. Jones started to relearn his craft. And now, after the last two decidedly post-ironic albums, the question remains, has “Jones the Voice” really become a genuinely credible artist?The organisers of the 2012 Blues Fest series certainly felt so. And Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There are worse assignments than making a film about Nicola Benedetti, and the glamorous 25-year-old violinist had clearly entranced Lord Bragg. Mind you, you'd struggle to find much to dislike about her. She's funny and articulate and has a billion-watt smile, while being an utterly dedicated musician whose playing mixes technical command with potent emotional expressivess.It would also seem that she's driven by a mission to educate and inspire young(er) musicians so both they and classical music itself may have some prospect of future survival. She made the pointed comment that classical Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There was some pretty serious hair on view in the BBC's new film of Richard II, a play better-known for its luxuriant verse, and well there might be, given that the adaptation came to us courtesy that most fulsomely-maned of theatre directors, Rupert Goold. (Among his colleagues, only the RSC's Greg Doran can compete in the follicular sweepstakes.) That's all well and good, I can hear you asking, but did Shakespeare's extravagantly lyrical rhetoric survive the stage-to-screen transfer?The answer is yes in some places and not so well in others, but I can't imagine not being mesmerised by Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Searchers: Hearts in Their EyesKieron TylerAlthough second to The Beatles as Liverpool’s most consistent Sixties chart presence, The Searchers have never previously been given the box set treatment. Like the Fabs, they were innovative and influential. They presaged folk rock, and without them there would have been no Byrds and maybe even no Tom Petty. The subtitle, celebrating 50 years of harmony & jangle, says it well. The four CDS and 121 tracks take the story from 1963, before they signed with Pye Records, to the present day via their Seventies new wave-inclined recordings for Sire Read more ...