Reviews
Jasper Rees
Has modern cinema ever arranged quite so fetishistic an entrance? She’s blonde, she’s beautiful, and needless to say busty - a benign pneumatic deity who, gliding in slo-mo across a crowded screen, induces males of every age and hue to turn and gawp in frank, unreconstructed appreciation of her sheer unblemished wondrousness. Hollywood is zip-all without dream retail and the shameless objectification of women. But surely – surely – this is too much.The joke of She's Out of My League – let’s call it a joke, because it’s sometimes almost funny – is that romantic compatibility can be organised Read more ...
David Nice
To both paraphrase and contradict one of the many French critics who savaged young Bizet, his first stage work of genius mentions no fishers in its gawky libretto but offers strings of pearls in the music. That's to say, much more than the famous duet, the least moving number on offer last night. I’ve come to love this fitfully ravishing score’s gentle, intimate side but had given up on seeing a less than tawdry staging to solve the opera’s gimcrack orientalia. Yet here, with director Penny Woolcock steering a sensitive course between the devil of pure kitsch and the deep blue sea of over- Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Geordies love music. From Brian Johnson’s cap to Jimmy Nail’s crocodile shoes, they have melody in their blood. And they love a good story. All of which makes it little wonder that North-Eastern sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank are able to mine such a deep seam of Northumbrian folk music. What’s more remarkable is how they sing material so traditional, in accents so broad, and still sound so contemporary. It makes them different; it’s possibly what makes them so loved.It was not the sound, however of the girls that, last night, was, initially, most striking. It was their sense of theatre. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The opening night of Le nozze di Figaro was not so much an opera of two halves as an opera of two teams. In the pit we had Sir Colin Davis and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House offering a crisply incisive rendering of Mozart’s score; onstage we had the Royal Opera Chorus and a selection of soloists, most of whom seemed set on a rather different – and, in the case of the chorus, downright lacklustre – rendition of the score. Now on its second revival, David McVicar’s all-the-hallmarks-of-a-classic production should have the comfortable swagger of a sophomore, but it was the first-night Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister joins an ever-lengthening list of dramas detailing the joys, the struggles of lady-on-lady love. It’s never quite clear who these entertainments are for. Blokes, as we know, have a response to this stuff that hovers between complex and Neanderthal. Sometimes you wonder why the schedulers don’t always screen them during major sporting tournaments, when the chaps are all looking the other way. On the other hand, do fans of six-hanky chick flicks, legs curled on sofas across the land, really want to watch girls getting it on with girls? So you never know Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A Balanchine on a mixed bill is a reminder of what a choreographer should desire to offer his audience: a specific new experience of art each time, not a repeated thumbprint in every ballet. Balanchine grew up in a borderless theatre country - jazz, music hall, Broadway, Cubism, Russian imperialism, folklore, classical piano studies, all soaked his personality and fed his imagination. It is a range of experience that both Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon have grown up without and it made the last of the Royal Ballet’s triple bills a faintly poignant affair. If McGregor and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Silhouetted against the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay, a pelican surveys the scene from a quayside bollard, then takes flight. The beautiful opening shot of Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event establishes a mood of elegiac tranquility. We are at Ford Point, on the east shore of the bay, in a magnificent building – a Ford factory that made military vehicles in World War Two, but closed down in 1955. Floor to ceiling windows afford breathtaking views across the water and allow the California light to flood in, transforming the floor into a liquid sheen of shadows and reflections.In Read more ...
david.cheal
If the power-generating companies in the London area noticed a sudden surge in electricity consumption late on Sunday afternoon, I think I can explain why: many thousands of hair-straighteners and other beautifying devices were doubtless being put to use in the run-up to Lady Gaga’s show at the O2 Arena, the first of two nights in London. This was one of those shows that people got dressed up for, made themselves glamorous for; it was a big night out, and the result, as the O2 Arena filled up, was a sea of very straight and very shiny hair, often decorated with bows and flowers (though I also Read more ...
roslyn.sulcas
What is going on at New York City Ballet, home of the abstract, neo-classical, pared-down, no-scenery, no-story, nothing-extraneous aesthetic that George Balanchine made into an artistic religion? So far, three out of the four pieces commissioned for the company’s ambitious “Architecture of Dance” festival have been - more or less - story ballets (only Wayne McGregor has resisted the lure). Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna offered a dizzying whirl through a faux-19th-century ballet, complete with mystifying characters, impossible plot and glorious choreography. Of Benjamin Millepied’s why am I not Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Ian Bostridge is one of those artists – Andreas Scholl is another – whose technique is so suited to the recording studio, his recordings so ubiquitously loved and lived-with, that the opportunity to see him perform live has become one of conflict. Suffering from the same malaise as successful pop artists, concert performances inevitably become processed by over-exposed ears as acts of mimicry; studied verisimilitude to a recorded original jostles for validity alongside live creative re-imagining.Last night’s performance of Schubert’s late songs – the programme released on CD by Bostridge Read more ...
fisun.guner
Wood is a mysterious substance. We do not make it, it makes itself. It is useful to us, alive and dead. Without it, our history would not be the same. But it is so ever-present, so much a part of that history, that we rarely see the wood for the trees. David Nash has seen both the wood and the trees for years. To him, wood is life. The opening of this show says it all. Outside the first gallery is a huge eucalyptus, split into three by the sculptor. (Nash only works with “found” wood – from dead or dying trees, offcuts from tree-surgeons, or from wood yards – "wood Read more ...
sue.steward
In the week that Sarah Ferguson was caught on a secret camera receiving a stash of $40,000 from News of the World journalists, Tate Modern launched this ambitious and excitingly diverse photography exhibition. Had the meeting been earlier, the incriminating images would have been perfect for the show. Instead, the Royal Family is spied on in Alison Jackson’s unusually generous parody, The Queen Plays with her Corgis. Spread across 14 rooms, the collection holds over 250 still images and several short films, and includes work by legends from the early years and 20th-century icons (from Read more ...