Reviews
Peter Culshaw
For me there is a trinity of black musicians, visionaries who reshaped music in the last half-century: James Brown, Miles Davis and Fela Kuti. And just as it’s hard to imagine a biographical musical of James Brown or Miles Davis coming off - because which mere actor is ever going to have their charisma, attitude or moves - likewise it seemed a stretch to imagine Fela! being much more than sophisticated karaoke. Karaoke with a message and some groovy dancing, no doubt. But somehow this production pulled off the impossible. Near as dammit anyway.One immediate plus of the show, transferring from Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When The L Word, an American drama series following the interconnected lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles, first aired in 2004, much of the acres of coverage it attracted made disbelieving mention of the cast members’ attractiveness, which is an implicit suggestion that lesbians are more usually at the back of the queue when good looks are being given out. Rather irritatingly, Lip Service, a drama series following the interconnected lives etc etc... in Glasgow, and which was immediately dubbed "the British L Word", garnered some of the same responses when it first aired last month. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Adrift (A Deriva), Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia’s third feature film, is a sensuous coming-of-age story as well as an ode to the Brazilian beach landscape of Buzios and the band of gorgeous bikini-clad teenagers who run wild in it. Although Dhalia says the film is not strictly autobiographical, he concedes that it partly mirrors his own childhood beach holidays near Recife and his parents’ divorce when he was 10.The family in Adrift - which is set in the 1980s (you can tell because a typewriter features heavily and there are no iPods or mobiles) - seems idyllically happy at first Read more ...
josh.spero
If you found yourself thinking that you were watching Mission: Impossible rather than Imagine, you could have been forgiven. Alan Yentob had clearly been banned from meeting Ai Weiwei in China, and so one of their interviews was conducted over a webcam, with Yentob sitting in the dark, like some spymaster of the arts.This was even before Ai had been put under house arrest to prevent him from attending a party he arranged to celebrate the demolition of his studio in Shanghai (a studio which the Chinese Government had asked him to put up in the first place...). All of which prompts the question Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Harry Potter has devoured entire childhoods, swallowed adolescences whole. Not to mention swathes of many a middle age. There are those of us who have read all 2,765,421 words (I checked) of the seven-part saga out loud to their children. Adults who would sooner use diminishing brain-cell capacity to store more pertinent information can tell you who teaches Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, the uses of gillyweed and the difference between a grindylow and a blast-ended skrewt. There is of course nothing more to be said. Review Harry Potter? You might as well review global warming, or Bill Gates’s Read more ...
carole.woddis
It’s just the luck of the draw. I’ve been sent to prison twice now in the past four days. Last Friday it was Clean Break’s day-long six-play epic in Soho. Last night it was an 80-minute all-male affair at the Roundhouse. Needless to say the encounters were planets apart. Men, after all, come from Mars, already primed for battle, women from Venus. Philip Osment’s Inside, however, once again provides living proof of the absurdity of such simplistic, reductive analysis. People are people. Each individual has their own story to tell and is shaped by conditions and environment and what they have Read more ...
marcus.odair
They began with a whimper, rather than a bang. Bronx bassist William Parker was still tuning up when Zhenya Strigalev, Russian by birth but a regular performer at this south London restaurant and vodka bar, summoned the first quiet squeak from his alto saxophone. Parker’s playing became gradually more deliberate, but it was hard to say exactly at what point the London Jazz Festival gig had officially begun until Parker’s co-leader, the Louisiana-via-Chicago drummer Hamid Drake, finally picked up his mallets.For those who continue to insist that avant-garde artists from Cecil Taylor to Read more ...
howard.male
With a title like Accused it would be easy to imagine that Jimmy McGovern’s new series was going to be just another generic courtroom drama, but McGovern would never be that predictable. The man who made Brookside grittily unmissable back in the 1980s, reinvented the TV crime genre with Cracker in the 1990s, and then settled into full maturity with The Street which ended last year, would probably rather retire than deliver anything that wasn’t in some sense fresh and innovative. He’s now one of only a handful of TV writers whose name alone guarantees a certain kind of direct, powerful drama Read more ...
peter.quinn
A member of Miles Davis's legendary second quintet (“arguably Miles's best ever group” according to the Penguin Jazz Guide); a composer of standards (“Watermelon Man”, “Dolphin Dance”, “Maiden Voyage”, “Cantaloupe Island”) and soundtracks (Antonioni's Blow-Up, Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight); winner of over 10 Grammy Awards, the first for his 1983 hit single “Rockit”, the most recent for his magnificent 2007 Joni Mitchell tribute album River: The Joni Letters (one of only two jazz recordings to win the coveted Album of the Year award, the other being Getz/Gilberto over 40 years ago). Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Hard to believe that Mark-Anthony Turnage, the bovver-booted, tank-topped composer of Night Dances and Greek in the 1980s, has reached his half-century. The Essex-boy image is still intact, somewhat mellowed perhaps; the boots have gone, the tank top remains, and the music has lost not one iota of its original brilliance and pizzazz.All but one of his four works in this birthday concert were from the last decade, but the only traces of middle age were in the better absorption of influences, the freer control of form, slightly more thorough risk assessment in the handling of the instruments. Read more ...
david.cheal
Then there was the succession of guest artists, among them Neneh Cherry, De La Soul and Mark E Smith (who looked as if he had just nipped across the road from a session in the pub), who passed across the stage. Oh, and the endlessly inventive Jamie Hewlett animations that poured across the video screen.It was bewildering, and brilliant. Although Gorillaz were created by Albarn and Hewlett in 1998, it took seven years for them to make the transition from being a “virtual” band of animated comic-book characters to a proper stage ensemble, with their sensational 2005 residency at the Manchester Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With a Royal Television Society award in the bag for its first series, Garrow’s Law has shifted up a gear with a batch of new stories about such momentous issues as homosexuality in the 18th century, the callous treatment of injured servicemen and attitudes to women in a supposed Age of Enlightenment. Episode one (of a measly four) squared up to the horrors of slavery, as crusading barrister William Garrow (Andrew Buchan) picked apart the case of a mass drowning of slaves en route from West Africa to the Caribbean.What gives the show its fascination, apart from its excellent ensemble cast and Read more ...