Reviews
david.cheal
My, haven’t they grown? In the several years (perhaps even a decade) since I last caught Placebo live, they’ve gone from being a scrawny three-piece with a somewhat thin sound – for much of the gig, I saw, they didn’t even have a bassist on stage – to become a properly equipped rock band with six on-stage members: here, on the first of two nights in south London, the band consisted of the regular trio, plus three side-persons on guitars, bass, keyboards and violin. They made quite a noise, blasting out satisfyingly slabby slices of sound.
And their stage show is impressive these days, too; Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The business end of 1980s BBC sitcom, the Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister series delivered political body-blows while sporting a dapper suit – satire with a gracious smile. In today’s era of muscled political heavies like The Thick of It, the Jay/Lynn brand of PG humour seems as antiquated as a blunderbuss – particularly when translated to the stage – but with just a few tweaks proves to be surprisingly effective.Global warming, the financial crisis, terrorism, the decline of the BBC – in the years since Jim Hacker and his staff last paced the carpets of No 10, Britain has only sunk Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nigel Cole’s bright and breezy film opens with news footage and advertising reels about the American car giant Ford, which in 1968 had 24,000 men working at its Dagenham plant in Essex and only 187 women. It may have been the decade of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and David Hockney - all vibrant colours and youthful energy - but the Swinging Sixties are far removed from the gritty reality of these low-paid workers’ lives.The 187 women work in appalling conditions in their separate part of the factory - freezing and with a leaking roof in winter, baking hot in summer - as they stitch Read more ...
fisun.guner
Treasures from Budapest – phew! It’s overwhelming. One staggers out quite cross-eyed and wobbly-kneed. There are over 200 works, for heaven’s sake. And so many Virgins: sweet-faced Italian Madonnas, austere Eastern European Madonnas, pallid German ones. There’s a tiny, exquisite yet unfinished Raphael Madonna, known as The Esterházy Madonna, since much of the collection of Old Masters shown here was amassed by Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy. Oh, and there’s the stubby-nosed, chinless Viennese one by an unknown altar-piece painter (such an arrestingly odd face; are her eyes actually going in the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When cultural talk drifts toward Mr Big, thoughts tend to turn to Sex and the City's Chris Noth, whose New York is world enough and time away from the doomed metropolis populated by the "big fellah" played by Finbar Lynch in Richard Bean's play of the same name. This big guy is, in fact, slight but menacing: the type of man not unacquainted with the very methods of violence which Harold Pinter, among others, dramatised so well. And when Lynch's Costello remarks, "Unlike you, I am not mentally ill," one sits up and takes notice. The issue here has less to do with what Costello is not and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the BBC still in the middle of shooting their revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, ITV1 have nipped in ahead of them with Julian Fellowes's spiffing new sundown-on-the-aristocracy drama. In a battle of the stage dames, the Beeb has bagged Eileen Atkins, whereas ITV has signed up Maggie Smith as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham. So far she has not been called upon to say, "A handbag?"The extended opening sequence of this 90-minute scene-setter fixed the date as April 16, 1912, and the camera rambled around the sprawling pile of Downton Abbey as the carefully delineated echelons of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
People always overlook how much of a hippie Richard Wagner was intellectually. His philosophical stance differs little from that of Neil from The Young Ones. It's a side of Wagner you can't get away from in Tristan und Isolde, with its endless railing against temporal realities and its search for universal oneness - yeah man, oneness. And it was doubly impossible to avoid these stoner-like thoughts last night at the Philharmonia Orchestra's Royal Festival Hall performance, where Bill Viola's videos - a typically elemental smorgasbord, with Adam and Eve types dressed in nappies - Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nowadays, stand-ups who can fill the Enormodome grow on trees. But once upon a time, before comedy was the new rock’n’roll, that sort of thing didn’t happen. Then David Baddiel and Rob Newman played Wembley Arena. It feels like a long time ago. While Newman’s career wandered off the map, Baddiel became exceptionally celebrated as, in effect, Frank Skinner’s straight man. He last did stand-up in 2003, and that was a corporate gig to a roomful of bankers he deliberately offended. Last night he stepped back before an audience to – as he more than once insisted - try out some stuff. Read more ...
David Nice
Shchedrin's best works, in my experience - and his output has been prolific of late - colour and treat the themes of others: chastushki or Russian street songs in the brilliant Naughty Limericks Concerto (to be heard in the second programme of the season), Tchaikovsky in the Anna Karenina ballet and Bizet in his best-known score, music from Carmen arranged for strings and percussion to fit the brilliance of his great ballerina wife, Maya Plisetskaya.Last night I found I liked the so-called Carmen Suite - ie the complete ballet score - a little less than I used to. Its more playful aspects Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
No, not some crazy remake of an Eighties soap featuring various members of the Bach family (though I wouldn’t put it past certain channel programmers to come up with the idea), but the Academy of Ancient Music’s (AAM) new series of concerts, which in a nutshell gives them the chance to perform lots of Johann Sebastian, with two bookend concerts covering the befores and the afters, as it were. Bound to get the crowds in and looks nice on the posters.Last night’s concert focused on Bach’s ancestors: specifically great uncle Heinrich, and his two sons Johann Michael and Johann Christoph (no Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Quietly, without pomp and fanfare, Ashley Page has been mustering a balletic strike force over the border in Scotland. Scottish Ballet has launched the new ballet year with a programme that trumps anything else offered in Britain as a season opener, two demanding and brilliant works of the past (well done) and the gamble of a new creation of dance, music and design.Compared with the opening offerings of English National Ballet and the Royal Ballet - and even with the lively Birmingham Royal Ballet opening programme (of which more tomorrow) - this combination of Ashton’s miraculously stylish Read more ...
sheila.johnston
It's the Mousetrap of musicals, the wholly unstoppable show and, to mark its 25th anniversary this year (the 30th, if you date it back to the initial French concept album and Paris production), it will be staged in London at three different venues. You can even see them all in a single, mighty weekend bender, if the mood takes you: the original Les Misérables at the Queen's Theatre, a celebratory all-star concert at the O2 Arena on 3 October and an invigorating new production which plays at the Barbican after a national tour until 2 October.Sadly, in this annus miserabilis, the festivities Read more ...