Emotional truth backed up by musical sophistication is what saves Puccini’s drama about a geisha deserted by an American officer from mawkishness. Director Daisy Evans has a very good idea for getting at its palpitating heart in a production of stunning visual beauty; Celine Byrne in the title role gives us vocal opulence but not nearly enough identification with a woman whose total, misplaced love leads to painful hope and desperate tragedy.A student who was at a Dublin discussion with Evans told me her essential concept, and I thought it sounded promising: at Pinkerton’s funeral many years Read more ...

Am I dreaming? Did I really see a living composer of contemporary music given a prolonged standing ovation for conducting his own works in the Bridgewater Hall, twice over?We all know the difference between polite applause for new music and real enthusiasm. And John Adams seems to have a following who show the real thing – of a variety of age groups, too. The California-based creator began his own festival with the Hallé on Thursday night with two pieces which were part of the celebration of the opening of the hall 29 years ago, one of them – Slonimsky’s Earbox – then receiving its world Read more ...

The greatest procession of mass movements ever composed merits the best line-up of soloists, both vocal and instrumental, as well as the perfect ensemble – small in size, big and rich in sound where needed – and inspired direction. That it was likely to get them seemed obvious from the advertised names, but last night, as always, Peter Whelan inspired everyone to go beyond what we might have imagined.He applies pressure points imperceptibly everywhere so that Bach opens out from period-style devotion to something more operatic, above all in the first choruses of the B minor Mass and Read more ...

Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 novel The Line of Beauty finds a distinct beauty all its own in this long-awaited Almeida Theatre premiere, the play's linearity a decided jolt after the more jagged new writing in which this venue has specialised of late.Returning to the Almeida for the first time in over 25 years, the director Michael Grandage brings a shimmering melancholy to a theatrical bildungsroman that plunges us headlong into the often terrifying hedonism of the 1980s. Jack Holden's astute adaptation keeps pace with the societal savagery of the novel, but not before reminding us that Read more ...

The first words are spoken after “Worldwide Epiphany,” the 20th song. “Thank you” is all Todd Rundgren says. With this, the set ends.It wasn’t that he was inscrutable or failing to acknowledge the audience during the previous hour and 50 minutes. A couple of lower-level sections like a catwalk parallel the stage before the front row of the stalls. Rundgren often paced this space, breaching the barrier between those who were there to see him and the performance. But, still, there are no introductions, no badinage.Performing a song like “Fascist Christ” – the set’s 18th – maybe said more than Read more ...

Hedda Gabler is a Hollywood star of The Golden Age – or rather, she was. She walked off the set of two movies into a five-film deal and didn’t come back. Millions watched her, but only a very select few saw her, and that paradox became insupportable. Those in the know were privy to a secret that would, in 1948 under the USA's racist Hays Code and its British mimicking, ruin her, professionally and personally. She knows that her Sword of Damocles swung closer every day, even behind drawn curtains.Tanika Gupta’s spectacularly successful reimagining of Ibsen’s classic is more than an "After…" Read more ...

The Irish diaspora in London were out in force for Emma Doran’s appearance at Leicester Square Theatre. Her online work and her appearance on Amazon Prime Video's LOL: Last One Laughing Ireland has gained her a huge fanbase in Ireland and beyond – although she did ask if the English in the room had been dragged along by an Irish pal. In truth, they were probably fans anyway – and would surely have been at the gig’s end.Doran is energetic and warm-hearted, but there’s a steeliness about her, too, and occasionally some of her very frank material pushes the envelope, taste-wise. Mostly Read more ...

There’s a line in the late Richard Greenberg’s 2013 play that refers to a recently elected showbiz type turned politician who sports puffed up hair – but it’s not the current incumbent of what’s left of the White House but Ronald Reagan. For the first half of this well-made play, we are in 1980, the election has just returned the former governor of California, and the Bascov tribe is gathering for Christmas lunch (these are liberal Jews) at the vast Upper West Side apartment of Ben (Daniel Abelson) and Julie (American actress Jennifer Westveldt, in her UK debut). An outsize Christmas Read more ...

The problem with making TV dramas about unsolved real-life murder mysteries is that they’re still unsolved, unless the film-makers decide to invent a fictional denouement. This might well trigger an avalanche of legal and ethical objections.Thus, director Stefano Sollima’s four-part examination of Italy’s notorious “Mostro di Firenze” murders, which left a trail of 16 dead bodies between 1968 and 1985, can only hint strongly at the identity of the perpetrator (the individual in question vanished in 1988, and no further murders subsequently took place). But Sollima’s ambitions reach beyond the Read more ...

A curious mind, indeed. Outer space, and what may be there. Communicating with those in the hereafter. Spooks, vampires and other horror film perennials. The wild west. Deceased rock ’n’ rollers Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly.Joe Meek’s preoccupations weren’t hidden. The records he produced and the songs he wrote reflected them. Much of his output was a form of musical autoportrait: auditory reportage expressing personal fixations. When he was at his commercial and creative peak in the early to mid Sixties, anyone could latch onto Meek’s obsessions via, say, a hit single like John Leyton’s “ Read more ...

As the Poppies’ set at Birmingham’s O2 Academy drew to an end on Friday night, co-vocalist Mary Byker barked into his microphone: “Reform is on the rise? Why is that? We shouldn’t be singing this song anymore”. The song in question had their home crowd pogoing like lunatics and howling back at the stage, “Ich bin ein Auslander auch!” at the top of their lungs.Strangely, Pop Will Eat Itself aren’t really thought of as one of the most political bands around, even if they did also play a rerub of their 1994 collaboration with the Prodigy, “Their Law” during the evening. Early in their career the Read more ...

Write about what you know, they say. And just as her previous show was about imminent motherhood (she performed the show while heavily pregnant) now Janine Harouni brings us This Is What You Waited For, which is about – you’ve guessed it – being a parent.The American comic, however, doesn’t deliver a mushy paean to her toddler son, although he certainly provides a lot of comedy, not least about his big head and the bragging rights she gets for having birthed him.Rather, she digs into what it means to be a parent, how we all regress to our childhood selves when we're with our parents, and what Read more ...