Reviews
edward.seckerson
Where has this idea come from that Kurt Weill somehow lost his edge or, worse yet, sold out when he headed Stateside? Have the people who perpetrate this nonsense actually heard the Broadway shows? The diversity of subject matter, the individuality of the melodic style, the willingness to be easily assimilated and to embrace and to challenge a tradition that was growing in ambition and sophistication – this was the American Weill. As his wife Lotte Lenya put it: there were never two Weills – “only one, or possibly a thousand”.
To be fair, access to Weill’s American catalogue, in context and Read more ...
howard.male
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an amphetamine-fuelled chicken on rollers? No, it’s the one-time guitarist for Dr Feelgood (during the only period that matters) still doing the moves that made him the main reason to see the band in the mid-1970s. Now bald-headed and bushy-browed but still delivering those electrically charged stares (which he learnt to do during a brief stint as a schoolteacher), he had the air of a benevolent dictator last night as he surveyed the Academy’s crowd for would-be assassins to mock-machine-gun with his trusty Stratocaster.To an audience made up of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Those ancient Egyptians, they loved life! So much so that they even conceived of an afterlife that differed hardly at all from the one on Earth, only better: they didn’t get sick and they carried on just as before, to eternity – which might sound like a bore to some, but given that the average life expectancy for an ancient Egyptian - even a very rich one - was 35, a certain reluctance to leave the earthly realm was understandable.In the divine realm of The Field of Reeds, the lucky few would drive their oxen, plough the fertile fields and paddle their boats. If they didn’t fancy doing much Read more ...
joe.muggs
Rave music, in its many ever-mutating forms, is now more than a generation into its existence. Many, possibly most, of the crowd pushing into Heaven, under Charing Cross station, weren't even born when acid house fully hit the UK in 1988, but none of them are here for some retro experience. It's hard, as a superannuated lover of electronic beats, not to feel cultural vertigo at the fact that what once felt like the most impossibly inhuman of sounds has now become so ubiquitous and so established as to be a kind of folk music. But there it is, as established as the blues or punk rock, and as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Places, please, deliciousness, please. This is Delibes, a man whose music goes with delectable disbelief, and this is that zany thing, a Fifties nymph ballet, so let us sip hallucinogenic Arcadian cocktails and leave normality at the cloakroom. But the sheer prettiness of Léo Delibes's ballets (La Source, Coppélia, Sylvia) is too much for most dancemakers to digest. Even a choreographer so oozing charm as Frederick Ashton made no classic with his 1952 staging of Sylvia. Last night, given the bumbling performance by the Royal Ballet after a few years’ absence, it came over even more as a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Mike Leigh's Another Year traverses the four seasons beginning with spring, and yet the mood is autumnal throughout. People don't sunbathe or picnic or build bonfires or for the most part respond in any particular way to the passage of time. Instead, they nurse cups of tea, share (if they're lucky) in a cuddle, and bear out in varying ways the truth of a remark that gets voiced well into the film. "Life's not always kind, is it?" asks Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a gently spoken medical counsellor who knows that no reply is needed; the answer is on full, melancholic view all around her.At first, you Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Todd Phillips’s interest in road trips as a hook for 90 minutes of male bad behaviour continues with this virtual remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. For mismatched couple Steve Martin and John Candy, read Robert Downey Jr and Zach Galifianakis. “I despise you on a cellular level,” Downey Jr tells the latter, whose boundless stupidity directly causes him to be banned from plane travel by Homeland Security, battered by a wheelchair-bound Iraq veteran, have his arm broken in a car crash, shot (twice) and arrested by Mexican border guards. You can’t blame him.Phillips’s films are slowly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The TMA regional theatre awards are about to be announced, which makes it perfect timing to visit a nominee - one of the UK’s most influential venues, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. The SJT was the country’s first theatre in the round and has been associated with new writing since it was established, as the Library Theatre, in 1955.Joseph was the son of actress Hermione Gingold and publisher Michael Joseph, but the SJT’s most famous association has been with Alan Ayckbourn, its third artistic director, who served from 1972-2009 and premiered more than 200 plays in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How do young modern choreographers engage with their audience? With references from the street - motion that the audience knows and recognises? With musical expressiveness? With the development of a technical style that has a language of its own? How about with an instinct, a yearning to entertain? Surely not!Questions, questions, after seeing two typically talented dancemakers of 2010, an era when it’s common for audiences to be left drifting without paddles, wondering if there’s a map under the seat somewhere to help them to steer by. In other words, it’s either got too many confusing Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There’s an interesting back story to The Trip. Before Rob Brydon was “discovered” by Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow production company in 2000, he was a workaday comic and Coogan was then at the height of his Alan Partridge-induced success. Since then Brydon has become a household name, not least for his role as Uncle Bryn in Gavin and Stacey, while Coogan these days features in the media more for his, er, interesting private life than his undoubted comedy genius, which some critics suggest has been on the wane.In 2005, director Michael Winterbottom brought the two comics together in A Cock and Bull Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bounding on stage in a purple version of the man dress pioneered by Mick Jagger at The Stones’s 1969 Hyde Park concert, Ariel Pink looks like a mistranslated version of what a late-Sixties rock star should be. His long hair is dyed blonde. The roots show. His make-up is already smudged, as if applied with mittens. It’s a wonky look, in keeping with his music; a music that sounds like a badly tuned radio playing the hits of the early Eighties, the smooth soul of the Seventies and Sixties bubblegum garage pop all at once. Los Angeles’s most peculiar art rocker doesn’t seem to be playing it Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Offbeat in more than just their rhythms, jazz musicians have always had an affinity to the extraordinary, living lives syncopated against the regular tread of society. Maybe it was the informality of their training, or the influence of brothels, bars and back streets that were their concert halls, but the likes of Buddy Bolden and Django Reinhardt have left a legacy of autobiography every bit as bold and unusual as their music. It is in this legacy that Alessandro Baricco’s fictional pianist Novecento claims his share, in a 90-minute monologue that riffs on the unlikely melody of his life to Read more ...