Reviews
Jasper Rees
He’s been in the presence of murderers, rapists and paedophiles. He’s auditioned naked for a porn movie and submitted his tender midriff to liposuction. He’s spent more time than can be good for anyone in the company of Mr and Mrs Christina Hamilton. Yet it was only last night that, for the first time ever, audiences glimpsed Louis Theroux in a state of unvarnished terror. And fair play, he wasn’t afraid to show it.The cause: a chimp, young but already powerful and, in the tentative Theroux embrace, threatening at any moment to remove, by force, the popular proboscis of documentary television Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's nothing like winning a gong to rock your world. Last August, Russell Kane won the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award for his Fringe show and his level of celebrity skyrocketed. But within a few months his marriage broke down - and the resulting introspection provided the starting point for a very fine show, Manscaping, which I saw at the Palace Theatre in Westcliff-on-Sea.Kane was very much on home territory – he could walk to the theatre, he told us – and much of the opening 10 minutes was spent guying the locals. Ockendon and Westcliff in particular got it in the neck, for very Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At Murry Bergtraum high school in Queens, New York, John Leguizamo was voted the "Most Talkative" student by his classmates. Not much has changed. As this one-man show demonstrates, Leguizamo talks like a Gatling gun on speed, switching almost unconsciously between English and Spanish, and likes to rattle through a gallery of impersonations with scurrilous, hyped-up intensity.The Bogota-born performer is hardly a household name in Britain, but as Ghetto Klown jitters edgily down its autobiographical path, Leguizamo's accomplishments begin to assume reasonably impressive proportions. From a Read more ...
josh.spero
The easiest mistake to make in appreciating George Condo would be to assume that his manic style reflects a manic creation or a manic practice. Some of Condo's paintings and drawings, with their childlike loops and gurning, disfigured faces, look like he made them in a fit of violence or some hysterical trance, but the real surprise of two new shows at the Hayward Gallery and at Sprüth Magers in Mayfair is the care and the calmness that lies behind them.Condo has developed a language of painting which mixes quotations from earlier artists with a cartoonish accent, adding his familiar Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Boy, do Arctic Monkeys move fast. There were 21 songs in their set at the O2 Arena last night and at one point they were racing through them at such a breathtaking lick I thought I would be on my way home within the hour. In the end their performance clocked in at around the length of a football match thanks to some pauses to swap guitars. Plus a break for Alex Turner to stand by the drums and ostentatiously comb his elaborate quiff. Some sections of the crowd might have questioned Turner’s surprising 2011 rug-rethink, but no one would dare question his ability to pen a brilliantly infectious Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s a long time since I laughed during a show as much as I did in this one. And not, I hasten to add, in a snarky, narky, sarky way, but simply because it was fun. In another illustration of just how deeply competitive the business of the arena pop show has become, Britney Spears’s Femme Fatale tour is a formidable song-and-dance spectacle, with a full complement of dancers and hydraulics and epic visuals, and one that also features some damn fine music. But what makes this one memorable is that it's sexy and silly in equal measure.First, I laughed at the sheer campness of the opening Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Czech Suite, Two Slavonic Dances Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics)It’s easy to become a little obsessed with obscure, underrated music. You bang on and on about works which you’re convinced are masterpieces which no one ever seems to play. Which means that it’s also easy to dismiss pieces of classical music which are genuinely popular. You think you know them so well as to never need to hear them again. Grieg’s Piano Concerto and Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony are perhaps the easiest of all to undervalue; they’re deservedly loved because Read more ...
David Nice
With Riccardo Chailly's Leipzig Beethoven series well into its capacious stride, another cycle of symphonies keeping unusual company begins. This one featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra will take longer and features six conductors, four of them known masters of their subject, chimerical Sibelius. The only problem last night was that Sakari Oramo, in tandem with his charismatic soprano wife Anu Komsi, took us to such strange and wonderful places in the first concert that I want them both back for the next five.The format was a BBC Symphony speciality, a four-work programme, which hasn't Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Pete Versus Life, being a bit of a departure from the sitcom norm, wasn't to everyone's taste when the first series was screened last year; but I'm very glad that Channel 4 commissioners kept faith with it and have now brought it back for a longer second season - and that its occasional weak points have been tweaked to great effect.Its titular hero (Rafe Spall) is a sports journalist who, in any given situation, will say the wrong thing. It's not that he is mean, more that he doesn't have much of a brain to think with, which gives him an astonishing capacity to make a mildly Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Blessed are the dead”, sings Brahms in the final movement of his German Requiem. And as far as the rest of this concert was concerned it was perhaps just as well. In Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the children are all dead; and in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw everyone else has passed on except, of course, the survivor. The audience was not so much dead as largely absent, frightened off, I suppose, by the dreaded Arnold. Or maybe they were just at home painting pumpkins.They missed a brave programme, but a brilliant one. Schoenberg’s brusque, utterly unsentimental masterpiece is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This wasn’t going to offer any surprises. Bernadette Nolan, Lulu and Stacey Solomon would deliver the questions they’d rehearsed. Manilow would respond, then deliver the relevant song. He’s a charmer, and you’d have to be made of lead not to be lifted by some of his songs. But he didn’t need this audience and format. The interaction added nothing. His fantasticness doesn't need restating.Barry Manilow will never be hip. His path is similar to Randy Newman’s, but his early liaison with Bette Midler always meant he was going to be broader, lean towards the bold, the brash. Answering a question Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having won early acclaim for his student feature film Under the Sun, Swiss-born but Germany-based director Baran bo Odar has taken a further leap forward with his commercial debut, The Silence. Based on a novel by Jan Costin Wagner, it's the story of the hunt for the killer of 13-year-old schoolgirl Sinikka Weghamm, whose disappearance uncannily mirrors that of 11-year-old Pia Lange 23 years earlier.Though the story is naturally concerned to some extent with police procedure, Odar's real interest is in the corrosive, unending effects of loss, loneliness, grief and guilt, which affect many of Read more ...