Reviews
graham.rickson
You approach the theatre via a cobbled side street and you’re harangued by a Salvation Army officer, pleading with you not to go inside this house of ill-repute. The City Varieties is an under-appreciated jewel of a venue, a Victorian music hall recently reopened after an expensive refit. The carpets are no longer sticky underfoot and the seats are slightly comfier. Fortunately, not much else has changed. This is an extraordinary time capsule of a place.A two-minute walk from the garish delights of 21st-century Leeds, and it feels as if you’ve stepped back in time. Which is the point. Big Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It must have been gruelling to pitch. A cynical modern satire set in a motivational conference for salesmen would have been a hard enough sell on its own. So too the choric figure who comments on the action directly to camera. But the bold USP of Acts of Godrey is the script: it's entirely in rhyming couplets.There is a place for rhyme in dramatic storytelling, and for most punters that place is Molière (Racine and Corneille not being box office these days). Only the other year Keira Knightley made her stage debut in an updating of The Misanthrope to contemporary media London. In recent times Read more ...
mark.kidel
Folk music is about roots and place and while rootedness can provide a welcome balance to the vagaries of a virtual and globalised world, it can also raise some less salubrious spirits: the British folk movement expresses at times a folksy form of insularity, in which place or nation are made just a little too sacred and exclusive. The Cecil Sharp Project, which emerged out of a week of workshopping sponsored last year by the Shrewsbury Folk Festival, avoided these pitfalls with a great deal of deftness, a sense of irony as well as a dose of humour.The assembled musicians drew from the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Francesca Zambello’s production of Don Giovanni may only be 10 years old, but is already showing signs of decrepitude. Even back in its youth in 2002-3, this staging never had much of a spring in its step, but at least there were some fantastic casts to compensate. Bryn Terfel, Anna Netrebko, Simon Keenlyside and Erwin Schrott have all taken their turn here, but even with Gerald Finley returning in the title role there’s little the current incumbents can do to do rescue this aged and confused attempt at a seduction.Set outside what appears to be a particularly ugly municipal swimming pool Read more ...
geoff brown
How do you solve a problem like Prokofiev? Not with a TV talent hunt promoted by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Not even, I’m beginning to think, with the current London Philharmonic concert series, Prokofiev: Man of the People?, devised by Vladimir Jurowski. Prokofiev’s uneven output; his parade of masks, making it hard to decipher what the composer is thinking and feeling: these form the principal difficulties, especially when the popular works are put to one side in the programmes and the gargoyles and dead dogs march in. We had a couple of those in last Wednesday’s London Philharmonic concert Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag from the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn set in London’s so-called Swinging Sixties is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their husbands. “Keep them all happy,” he says in cavalier style, “Happiness is transitory, of the moment.” He takes no responsibility other than helping to arrange the odd back-street abortion. Never get attached and never get dependent - these are his watchwords. Life’s a giggle. His attitude to women is expressed by his dated vocabulary – “bint”, “bird” or just “it”. And he’s always on the fiddle.Half a century Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Ralph Fiennes' commitment to the theatre, not least the classical repertoire, has long been a source of wonder, bringing legions of Voldemort followers to see him live, most recently as a movingly hirsute, brooding Prospero in an otherwise heavy-going account of The Tempest. So Fiennes deserves double credit for transmuting the Bardic passions that launched him on stage to the global marketplace of the screen, especially with a title that exists some way from the Hamlet-driven norm that tends to be the Shakespearean celluloid transfer of choice - as Fiennes' fellow Bardolator, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Canadian singer-songwriter Lindi Ortega took to the stage last night in a rococo Edinburgh broom cupboard looking like a country-fried Amy Winehouse in widow’s robes. As with most first impressions, it proved misleading. The visuals might have screamed Camden boho chic by way of New Nashville, but the voice was pure Dolly.Ortega has been making fine music for over a decade. Between spells providing vocal back-up for the likes of Brandon Flowers, she has carved her own niche. In the time between her first album, The Taste of Forbidden Fruit (2001) and her third, Little Red Boots (2011), she Read more ...
Jasper Rees
People tend to know three things about J.Edgar Hoover: that he was in charge of America’s internal security for four decades; that he kept secret files on the political elite; and that the most powerful unelected man in the nation's history liked to throw on ladies’ attire. Although sadly only two of the above turn out to be true, the facts have not stopped Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio from at least flirting with the elephant in the room. But we’ll cross that dress when we get to it.If this is a charmless and heavy-legged biopic, the genre itself has to take some of the rap. Fifty Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Who is Mr Putin?” That was the question being bandied about by journalists and Kremlin watchers in the months after Boris Yeltsin’s out-of-the-blue New Year’s Eve 1999 resignation. Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB operative in East Germany, was prominent in the St Petersburg city administration through the early 1990s; called to Moscow in 1996, he held various Kremlin jobs, before being appointed head of the FSB (the KGB’s successor) in July 1998, and in August 1999 Russia’s prime minister. His 2000 victory in presidential elections came as little surprise, and his assertive, populist tactics ensured Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
An interfering producer, an accountant who keeps trying to cut corners and costs, even a casting couch – making movies was never easy, according to this amiable new play by Nicholas Wright. Set in 1930s Hollywood and, in flashback, in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe, it is a kind of celluloid fantasia that charts a path from the shtetl to the stars. Films, for young Motl and the people of his village, are flickering, silvery dreams; a way of capturing a moment in time forever, of preserving memory, of drawing a connective thread between the present and the future. And they are emblematic Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“I’m not a beautiful woman,” Wallis Simpson once declared. “I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is dress better than anyone else.” Madonna’s second feature W.E. operates under a similar philosophy – with rather less success. Never knowingly under-dressed, under-designed or under-directed, the film contorts itself into ever more stylish poses in a desperate attempt to stun its audience into a couture-induced coma of submission.The lumpy silhouette of cinematic ambition cuts persistently through however, exposing the steel Madonna’s revisionist fairytale is so keen to strip from Read more ...