Reviews
peter.quinn
A flawless song list comprising Richard Rodney Bennett originals plus some of his favourite standards, stunning arrangements by conductor Scott Dunn, plus the mellifluous vocals of Claire Martin magically aligned in my Album of the Year, I Watch You Sleep, an extraordinarily beautiful tribute to Bennett marking the tenth anniversary of his death.It was one of several outstanding vocal jazz releases this year. Returning Weather, a new song cycle from the Dublin-born vocalist and composer, Christine Tobin, presented a fascinating exploration of cultural reconnection. The album’s striking sound- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Admirers of Hayao Miyazaki will find much to love in The Boy and the Heron, which he has said will be his final feature before retiring from film-making at the age of 82. It’s a beautifully crafted piece of work with all the tropes that admirers of Studio Ghibli have come to love over the years. The film opens with an apocalyptic fire; it’s night, the air raid sirens howl and the skies are filled with flaming fragments. We hear the frantic breathing of a boy, running towards the burning Tokyo hospital where his mother works. It’s 1943, the Pacific War is raging and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As the panto season is in full swing, theatregoers will be expecting to hear some smut. For those who don't like the traditional artform but still like a bit of filth – with songs – then Reuben Kaye's The Butch Is Back will do nicely.It's a storytelling show in a cabaret format as the fabulously dressed Australian comic and singer performs with his six-piece band. He has an extraordinary voice and the songs (arranged by his musical director Shanon D Whitelock, who is on keyboards) – bombastic, full-throated affairs and camp-as-you-like rockers – recount his childhood or act as a soundtrack as Read more ...
James Saynor
You don’t have to be a casting director to know that Britain has a remarkable reservoir of unstarry middle-aged actors who might, just occasionally, get top spot in a movie – Joanna Scanlon in the wondrous After Love (2020) being an excellent example. Now we have Maggie O’Neill, veteran of TV shows like Shameless, Peak Practice and EastEnders, who takes the lead in this equally likeable effort by writer-director Leo Leigh.It’s an ambling, facetious character-piece about hopeless classless numpties going round in circles, a film with surprisingly zero dud notes for a first-time moviemaker. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Back in those halcyon days of 2017, before the pandemic, Marc Almond did a tour of large concert halls, singing songs that had influenced him over the years. Needless to say, there was something of a focus on glam and proto-punk tunes from the likes of Lou Reed and David Bowie – which all seems to have sown the seeds for his latest musical direction.The Loveless are a Garage Rock band which comprise Marc Almond, Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s bequiffed guitarist, Neal X and Iggy Pop’s touring rhythm section of Max Hector and Ben Ellis – with additional help from James Beaumont’s keyboards and a brass Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What a beautiful, alternative evening of Christmas music this was, ranging in tone from bleakness to transcendence – a thrilling escape from the season’s cloying commercialism to a sense of something both mysterious and profound. Powerful new commissions from Ukrainian composers including Natalia Tsupryk heightened the sense that Christmas is a time to reflect as much on redemption from cruelty and the unknown as on any status-enhancing material possession.Last year the SANSARA vocal collective won universal plaudits for their album The Waiting Sky, which traces the journey from Advent to Read more ...
Alastair Davey
"Beautiful outside, unmissable inside" is the is the new tagline for the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. If the restoration of James Thornhill’s painted hall wasn’t enough to prompt a journey on the Thames Clipper, Paul Cocksedge’s installation, Coalescence might do the trick. Though contemporary critique is nothing new (think of Flora Yukhnovich’s interpretations of the Rococo style), Cockridge uses the hall as a backdrop for 2,500 pieces of anthracite, a high carbon coal, suspended in front of scenes depicting the Hanoverian dynasty. The resulting orb is remarkably striking and though Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Plays about the theatre tend to go down well with audiences. Why wouldn’t they? The danger is that they become too cosy as actors and audience smugly agree on the transcendence of the artform. Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue comes perilously close to falling into that trap, but, in the end, its wider preoccupations with old age, change, and the perils of the new, make it a rewarding and sometimes even challenging evening.You have to admire Thorne’s versatility. Last week, Stranger Things – The First Shadow opened, for which he contributed to the original story. While that show attempts Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The story of Edward Scissorhands may not seem an obvious Christmas subject, but it couldn’t be a more overt call for goodwill to all men. And there’s a hint of The Nutcracker about Matthew Bourne’s dance version, too.Created in 2005 and last seen in 2014, the piece is his Sadler’s Wells seasonal treat this year, and it’s more witty and beguiling than ever before, fine-tuned for today’s world, despite its age. The staple ingredients of the piece, adapted for New Adventures by Caroline Thompson from her screenplay for Tim Burton’s 1990 film, are the familiar ones: a sunny 1950s suburban Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
We think of the Wigmore Hall as a venue for intimate revelations, but in the right hands it can feel like a stadium. Last night’s all-Bach programme of festive music from the London Handel Players managed to embrace both moods.On a bill that began with three Advent or Christmas cantatas and finished with a Magnificat that sounded, well, magnificent, characterful solo parts for singers and instrumentalists combined with blazing ensemble climaxes that gave the impression of a stage populated by far more than five voices and 15 players. The outfit led by violinist-director Adrian Butterfield Read more ...
mark.kidel
To take a trip into the world of Issy Wood is to be embraced by paradox. A richness of imagery that can at time shock with its blandness and at others seduce with a sense of wonder; a perfectly accomplished surface that reveals, with familiarity, a labyrinth of unexpected depth and sensuality; a confrontation with the glitz of hyper-reality that’s constantly playing with the illusory nature of all images; collections of apparent trivia bathed in an aura of mystery.She has a large show right now at the splendid Lafayette Anticipations, a very well-run showcase for cutting-edge contemporary art Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There is a song by Syd Barrett, founder member of Pink Floyd, called “Golden Hair”. It’s on his album The Madcap Laughs, released in 1970, a couple of years after he left the band, and every time I hear it I feel like I’m falling in love again. It also features in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 epic, the aptly named Rock ’N’ Roll, now revived at the Hampstead Theatre by playwright and director Nina Raine.The figure of Barrett – an antic madcap whose use of LSD both inspired his psychedelic music and destroyed his mind – runs, skips and somersaults through the play, which spans European Cold War history Read more ...