Reviews
Thomas H. Green
Grimes’ new album, Visions, her third, is an invigorating piece of work, a very 2012 meltdown of twitchy tuneful electronica and sweet indie-ethereal singing. It’s an album that cannot decide whether to put on its dancing shoes or sit back and smoke a joint, so decides to muddle heads with skewed sonics while also making the feet twitch. The 24-year-old pink-haired Canadian naturally goes for the energized option in performance, but the venue is so crammed that movement is restricted, in fact, it’s distinctly uncomfortable, not conducive. But let’s rewind the clock a little.XOYO is sardine- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
David Cameron could hardly wish for a more apt musical to pep up the people’s spirits than Irving Berlin’s Top Hat, with its wheedling entreaties about the advantages of being caught in the rain, or putting on your best front, and all. Matthew White’s staging of Top Hat - said to be the first-ever theatrical version of the immortal 1935 Astaire and Rogers movie - is finely timed for a grim (and rainy) summer, with a smart and spirited production that pretty much puts the film on stage, making the best of what look like austerity budgets. If you manage to quell the thought that a Fred 'n' Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
With last month's debut album, Boys and Girls, still riding high in the charts and a buzzworthy Jools Holland performance under their belts – to say nothing of the attention they've attracted on their own side of the Atlantic from the likes of Jack White – Southern roots four-piece Alabama Shakes have become the hottest ticket in town on this, their first headline UK tour. Those dates on the run that aren't full have been upgraded to bigger venues and when they told me that their Glasgow date was sold out they meant SOLD OUT. The only reason I made it in at all was through creative use of an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a funny old game. Sport rewards the talented when they are young and their bodies responsive. A profession which requires the reflexes to work in instant harmony with the brain means that beyond a certain age, the gifted become instantly unemployable the moment they lose their magic powers. A case of they don’t think it’s all over: it is now. Michael Vaughan, the England cricket captain whose body decided to retire before he did, embarked here on a thoughtful trawl through the sporting world to ask a poignant question: how do you cope when the crowd has stopped applauding, the accolades Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Kevin Rowland always did march to the beat of his own drum. Whether it was purloining his album’s master tapes from his record company or refusing to consort with the music press, he constantly straddled a wobbly fence between control freak and paranoid lunatic. This, as much as Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ sublime, heartfelt music, made him a riveting, charismatic presence in the early 1980s. The name is now just Dexys, but what else had changed three decades on?Well, the seriously intense vocalist certainly sustained his contrary reputation at the Shepherds Bush Empire, following in the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Origami birds flock in graceful chorus, a dancer flutters two fans into a pulsing captive butterfly, curtains of cherry blossom descend over glowing paper lanterns, and of course a small bunraku puppet steals the show. Seven years on Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly is as beautiful as ever, and – if possible – even more Japanese.This Olivier Award-winning production is up there with Jonathan Miller’s Mafia Rigoletto as one of English National Opera’s all-time stars, and for its visual aplomb and emotive excess deserves every bit as long a career. Revived here by Sarah Tipple, the show has Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Simon Stephens is not only one of our most talented playwrights, he’s also the one most open to influences from German theatre. In 2007, he collaborated with director Sebastian Nübling on the world premiere in Hanover of his innovative play, Pornography, which took more than a year to be staged in the UK, in a superb version by Sean Holmes. Holmes is now head of the Lyric Hammersmith, which hosts Stephens’s latest collaboration with Nübling.Three Kingdoms is a dark thriller about sex trafficking. It begins with two British detectives, the botany-loving Ignatius and the German-speaking Charlie Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This music crept by me on the waters. Bangladesh’s Dhaka Theatre’s version of The Tempest took the musical route, and why not? It was always Shakespeare’s most musical play (with extant music for “Full Fathom Five” and other songs written by Robert Johnson). Four centuries after its premiere, probably over the river in Blackfriars, the play has been done in myriad incarnations around the world, including numerous sci-fi accounts, and bounced back to London last night courtesy of Rubayet Ahmed’s version.The adaptation included snippets of well-known Bengali folk tunes – drinking songs for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always a pleasure to watch comics first seen and enjoyed playing a tiny room at the Edinburgh Fringe make their television debut; it's an even greater pleasure to see two immensely talented comics make such an accomplished entrée as Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns did last night. But then they have a track record: in 2006 the duo (then performing as a threesome with Sophie Black as Fat Tongue) were nominated for best newcomer in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards.Their sketch comedy is mostly spoofs of instantly recognisable TV tropes that lend themselves to parody, but here given a neat Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s maybe one for their shrink. The filmmaking Duplass brothers are irresistibly drawn to male losers still clinging to the apron strings. In Cyrus Jonah Hill played an overgrown mommy’s boy in the grip of an oedipal love-in who fights off his single mother’s new man like a fat hellcat. In Jeff, Who Lives at Home things have moved on, though not in an evolutionary sense. Jeff (Jason Segel) may be a good decade older than Cyrus but developmentally he’s not much further down the track.A lumbering work-shy 30-year-old stoner who hangs, to be specific, in his mother’s basement in Baton Rouge, he Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Vollard Suite is Picasso’s most celebrated series of etchings. Named after Ambroise Vollard, the influential avant-garde art dealer who gave the 19-year-old Picasso his first exhibition in Paris in 1901, the series was commissioned by the dealer in 1930. For the next seven years Picasso worked on it in creative bursts, completing a series of 100 etchings. Last autumn, one of the complete set – a total of 310 were printed – was purchased by London-based private collector Hamish Parker as a gift to the British Museum.Since the series has never previously been shown in its entirety in the UK Read more ...
josh.spero
The demands of Titus Andronicus are probably at odds with the constraints of the Globe to Globe season: a travelling troupe would find it hard to get 80 gallons of fake blood through Customs. Nor are they likely to be furnished with the sort of special effects – removable hands, slittable throats – which the play needs.The solution the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, a company from Hong Kong performing in Cantonese, initially seemed to have to devised was perfect. For the first act, in which Roman general Titus demands that a son of the captured Tamora, Queen of the Goths, be killed, and the Read more ...