Reviews
Ismene Brown
Better late than never. It took till Act 3 for a new Juliet to fledge her wings and shed the nervous caution, but Melissa Hamilton, debuting yesterday afternoon in probably the Royal Ballet’s most coveted ballerina role, suddenly did what we all knew she could, and after a subdued first act seized the drama and the story. And, in Romeo’s phrase, light broke - the sun in the east. A fair new Juliet.Hamilton, a blonde beauty of 23, is the most interesting performer of young-generation girls at Covent Garden, an Irish child and late starter rejected by the Royal Ballet School, who refused to be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Some people – a very few – just have it. Never mind whether her songs appeal, or the style in which she performs them, but Sinéad O’Connor’s presence is extraordinary - as, of course, is her voice. She sings “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” a capella, dedicating it to PC David Rathband, the policeman blinded by Raoul Moat who recently committed suicide. The Queen Elizabeth Hall falls to pin-drop silence; O’Connor’s singing, which flecks wrenching forcefulness with heartbreak vulnerability, is relentless - it brooks no doubt. The song itself, translated from a 200-year-old Irish gravestone elegy Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“I know what I was angry about when I wrote this,” Nanci Griffith told the crowd as she introduced “Hell No (I’m Not Alright)”, “but you can get your anger out about whatever you want.”It seemed a little odd that Griffith left the big hook (if the bold, sloganned t-shirts of the crowd are anything to be believed) from new album Intersection until after the house lights came back up for the first time, but back in her native America the song can lead to pandemonium. Delivered with gusto, complete with synchronised clapping from two burly roadies in matching sunglasses, its lyrics are not Read more ...
howard.male
I must confess I wasn’t particularly looking forward to last night’s concert from the great elder statesman of South African music. This was largely because his most recent album Jabulani – recorded as a tribute to all the township weddings he went to as a child and youth – was marred by sentimentality and a lacklustre production. But then again one obviously shouldn’t be expecting the music of a 73-year-old to still be as fired-up as the work he produced in his prime.However, it quickly became apparent that Masekela wasn’t simply here to flog the new album. This is a musician who clearly Read more ...
ash.smyth
I figured there were two solid reasons to attend last night’s Florence + the Machine gig in North London. The first was that I’d given Ceremonials a fair few listens, and was beginning to conclude that the chaps at Island Records had identified what they thought constituted, hitherto, the "Florence sound", and then simply produced an entire album of it. I found the result somewhat less invigorating, less wild and haphazard than Lungs, F+tM’s debut, and wanted to know if it would be better on stage. The second was that, between her rather, um, “portable” lyrics and her high-impact manner Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Well, better late than never. I wanted to see The Stranglers at The Roundhouse in April 1977, but a combination of homework, strict parents and being way too young meant that I had to make do with playing their debut album Rattus Norvegicus IV to death in my bedroom. Neatly 35 years later I finally made it and the band did their bit by performing more tracks from their early years than they did from their very well-received latest album, Giants.The quartet was in remarkably fine fettle. The part of Hugh Cornwell, who left in 1990, is currently played by genial Sunderland musician Baz Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Everything that’s best about the opening episode of Paula Milne’s White Heat, a decade-straddling saga of seven friends who begin as flatmates in 1960s London, is encapsulated in its Hartley-quoting title, The Past Is a Foreign Country. For estranged friends Charlotte (Juliet Stevenson) and Lily (Lindsay Duncan) it’s also a country fraught with unresolved tensions and deeply painful secrets, and one that they’re forced to revisit after a death brings the old group back together in the present day. So far, so The Big Chill. But the more commonly drawn comparison has been to the Beeb’s Read more ...
David Benedict
Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party: comedy classic or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with added sneering? Ever since its first appearance on stage in 1977 and its subsequent record-breaking broadcast as a BBC Play for Today with an eye-widening 16 million viewers (not to mention those watching the subsequent DVD), there has been disagreement. Depending on your viewpoint, Lindsay Posner’s competent new production lives either up or down to your expectations. What it won’t do is make converts in either direction.This ferocious comedy which made Mike Leigh’s name is short on plot but big on situation Read more ...
Andrew Perry
With the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Nostradamus-predicted apocalypse both imminent (possibly), now is clearly an auspicious time for a doomsaying veteran punk combo such as Killing Joke to return to our midst. Unlike most of their late-Seventies peers, Jaz Coleman’s crew have always been around in some shape or form, hitting the pop charts in the mid–Eighties, and subsequently striking on numerous phases of cred, circa thrash metal, grunge, even trance (with the Pandemonium album in 1994, largely thanks to bassist Youth’s sideline as a house-y producer).In the early Noughties Dave Grohl Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Literary adaptations are a godsend to an industry that loves a good story but is too busy blowing the budget on chase sequences and explosions to pay a decent screenwriter. But among the glossy, desperately earnest adaptations (last year’s Jane Eyre, this year’s The Great Gatsby) there are also some quirkier reworkings that invite audiences to play an extended game of spot-the-classic – Clueless (Jane Austen’s Emma), Tamara Drewe (Far From The Madding Crowd) The Lion King (Hamlet – yes really). The novels of Thomas Hardy have drawn more attention than most, providing a whole filmic sub-genre Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There comes a point in every successful stand-up's career when television executives start calling. First it's appearances on panel and quiz shows, then a solo programme that showcases their live talents - but what then? Not everyone is a Graham Norton or a Dara Ó Bríain - both instant hits in whatever format TV can throw at them - so producers keep trying to invent a twist on well-tried formats when they shepherd a new star into the spotlight.With Sarah Millican, they have melded two - stand-up and chat show - and given hers a USP in that each week the comedy is themed around TV genres. In Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Royal families and royal academies. Aristocrats at ease in exquisitely landscaped gardens or inside in gorgeous drawings rooms. Actors emoting, notably Sir David Garrick and his troupe. Nabobs in India. All are depicted in Johan Zoffany’s rivetingly detailed paintings of Georgian society.Born near Frankfurt Johan Zoffany (1733-1810) travelled to further his career, one of many foreign artists who enlivened the more provincial English art scene. He was appointed to the Royal Academy by its founder, George III, in 1771, and became almost as famous for his depiction of painting studios as of Read more ...