Reviews
mark.kidel
Coram Boy is a thrilling story of dead babies, teenage love, material greed and the redeeming power of music. This is Christmas entertainment that packs a powerful punch, borne aloft by the inspiring sound of Handel’s Messiah, with horrific events presented on stage, an emotional rollercoaster ride that is definitely not for the very young or the faint of heart.The production comes from the same team that launched the show, based on Jamila Gavin’s now classic young persons’ novel, at the National Theatre in 2005. Adapted by Helen Edmundson and directed by Melly Still, it has been re-imagined Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What finer way to nudge us gently towards the forthcoming festivities and celebrate the season of goodwill than by creating a lurid reconstruction of the riots that scorched through London last summer. London's Burning was assembled principally from news footage of the events, which you'll recall was copious and shockingly vivid, while interspersing it with dramatic re-enactments of people's real-life experiences in Clapham. Quite what it was trying to tell us I'm not sure.One item not on screenwriter Mark Hayhurst's agenda was trying to explain the motivations of the rioters, who were Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The poster boy for a generation of thinking, reading, researching soloists, tenor Ian Bostridge is a regular recitalist. But the programmes he has curated for the current Bostridge Project at the Wigmore Hall have given him the opportunity to show that there’s a lot more to his skills than just performance. Sharing the stage over a sequence of concerts with artists including Angelika Kirschlager, Nicholas Daniel, Sophie Daneman and The English Concert, Bostridge has constructed a mini-season of “Ancient and Modern” themed events that bridge the divides between early and twentieth century Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frank Sinatra might have come to dislike being branded as part of the Rat Pack, but the phrase stuck and still sticks. Judging by last night’s Christmas-slanted show, just as he, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr live forever, so will that phrase. Eleven years on from the first Rat Pack Live From Las Vegas show the shine hasn’t gone and the trio – even though they aren’t really there – light up the Wyndham’s Theatre.Strolling on to open the show with “Come Fly With Me”, Stephen Triffitt is Frank Sinatra. He’s been at it for over 10 years and ought to be good, but if you’re a first-timer little Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fifteen years after its debut edition, the fourth instalment of the Tom Cruise MI franchise is louder, higher, noisier and even more ludicrous. However, there are saving graces. Simon Pegg, playing the gadget-nerd Benji Dunn (pictured below), is given a surprising amount of scope to throw in episodes of tension-relieving farce, while Jeremy Renner brings both grit and wit as the secret service bodyguard William Brandt who finds himself roped into Cruise's crew.Even the notorious control freak Cruise occasionally gives the impression that he can see the funny side, as if he's murmuring to Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Four children allowed to go off in a boat on the Lake District by their mother without a responsible adult or lifejackets? If this happened today Social Services would be down on mum like a ton of bricks. But this is 1929, long before the tyranny of parental paranoia, which may go part of the way to explaining why Arthur Ransome's story of childhood adventure, unfettered by adult interference, is such an enduring hit. And another reason why this West End transfer from the Bristol Old Vic is such a hit is the music from The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon.The involvement of Hannon inevitably Read more ...
David Nice
A young chap from Elsewhere woos an alderman's daughter: not Dick Whittington in panto London, but Wagner's Walther von Stolzing in an unseasonal Nuremberg. No one is going to mind the solstitial disjunction - celebrating midsummer revels in the dead of winter - when this great saga of art and society is buoyed up by Antonio Pappano's lovingly prepared conducting, a good cast, lusty chorus and colourful costumes. Yet only folk determined on seasonal jollity to the exclusion of all else might not feel a certain want of the darker side to the human predicament which ought to pave the way to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What makes something funny? Why do comics stand on stage in front of strangers and try to make them laugh? Is any subject beyond a joke? What is the purpose of Alan Yentob? Those questions – OK, only the first three – were raised by Imagine's presenter in this, the first of a two-parter about the art of stand-up.The documentary about comedy on this side of the pond (tonight's second part is about American stand-up) was stuffed full of comic talent – so full, indeed, that we saw unusually little of the presenter, although he still managed to shoehorn himself unnecessarily often into the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Here be wonderful images, in an anthology of two score of paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the mid-Nineties by 10 artists whose shared interests only sharpen their individuality. Francis Bacon is the autodidact in the group, which includes two Berliners – Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud – who came to England as children. David Hockney is the witty, adventurous northerner who has now returned, mostly, to Yorkshire from a life lived between London and Los Angeles. Patrick Caulfield is primarily concerned with vibrant still lifes and domestic interiors, Euan Uglow and William Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can see why prequels come into being. A dramatic character becomes a national treasure and eventually, once old age or worse removes them from the small screen, they are opportunistically exhumed by means of the backstory. Young Delboy was brought back to life in Rock and Chips. Young Morse is expected to be solving murders soon. And now here comes Young James Herriot. For all the logic of squeezing a last drop of juice out of a character, it seems a bizarre notion to revisit a vet who last shoved a forearm up a barnyard orifice more than 20 years ago.The Herriot industry carried all Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Call it an absurdly grand gesture if you like, but Manic Street Preachers' decision to bow out of live performance for a while with a gig in which they would play every one of their 38 singles had to be admired. It certainly had an all-or-nothing rigour that Richey Edwards would have endorsed. But would James Dean Bradfield recall all the words? Would Nicky Wire's knees survive all of that sustained bouncing around. Would piledriving drummer Sean Moore wear a hole in his skins? These and more questions were answered during last night's frequently stunning gig.The canny step was taken not to Read more ...
David Nice
Is it ever a good idea to programme two symphonies by one composer in a single concert? Maverick Valery Gergiev is likely to stand alone in applying the rule to Mahler. Yet curiously his Prom marathon of two big instalments made more sense as stages on a journey than yoking together the outwardly less time-consuming symphonic adventures of Sibelius. Jukka-Pekka Saraste's attempt last night to run the opposing approaches of the last two Sibelius symphonies head to head worked no better than usual.Maybe it partly felt that way because I have too fixed an idea of how much there is behind the Read more ...