Reviews
Saskia Baron
Pretty Red Dress opens with a classic Motown-esque girl group belting out a show tune before cutting to Travis (Natey Jones) as he leaves prison. Waiting for him outside is Candice (Alexandra Burke); she’s sitting in her Audi, singing along to the radio.At home is their teenage daughter, Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun), happy enough to have her dad back in their Lambeth flat on a council estate, but facing her own problems at school with both authority and friends.Candice works as a cashier at a local supermarket but dreams of being a performer; she spots a sequin-studded, bright red mini- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Simon Rattle’s farewell season as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra has inscribed a sort of artistic memoir as he moves from one of his beloved blockbusters to another. Last night, he closed his account at the Barbican (though he will regularly return as “Conductor Emeritus”) with Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-Symphonie.Under the baton of Sir Charles Groves, it thrilled him as a kid in Liverpool. It thrilled us, too, as the composer’s ecstatic, unbuttoned post-Second World War shout of love and joy drew from the LSO the most ferociously uplifting performance anyone could wish to Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre? And there's also Les Dennis neither dancing nor singing. Why? If you set aside such minor gripes, one can delight in a show that Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Billed as “a journey through painting and photography”, Capturing the Moment reveals many ways in which artists have responded to photography – either by taking up the camera themselves, as did Candida Höffer, Andreas Gursky, Louise Lawler and Thomas Struth, or by making some superb paintings.By way of introduction, the first room makes no sense, though. Picasso once said – probably as a riposte to anyone criticising his disregard for surface appearances – “photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Rachmaninov had his doubts about his Variations on a Theme of Corelli. He confided to Medtner that when he performed them, “I was guided by the coughing of the audience. Whenever the coughing increased, I would skip the next variation. Whenever there was no coughing, I would play them in proper order.”There was no coughing during Bocheng Wang’s technically fluid delivery of the variations at the Wigmore Hall. Each shift in mood was clearly delineated – from the sombre to the mischievous, from the gossamer light to the thunderous. Creatively the work may not have attained the heights that Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
A visitor to the city wishes to gain access to the law, but a gatekeeper blocks his entrance. The man petitions this imposing figure, who is only one of a series of legal bouncers. He is told there is gate after gate. He sits, he waits, he lies down, and eventually he expires. But not before making a close study of this implacable representative of the law. He even notes the fleas in the gatekeeper’s collar.Such is the fate of a character in Franz Kafka’s paranoid short story Before the Law. It comes to mind since visitors to the Carey Young show at Modern Art Oxford are invited to spend, if Read more ...
India Lewis
Small Worlds, the second novel from Caleb Azumah Nelson, is a delight: a book with a real feeling for sound and dance, and a sense of place from London to Ghana and back again. It’s a story of a first romance, the intricacies of family life, the importance of music, and the difficulties still faced by people of colour in the UK today. While it may not seem like it will set the world on fire, it’s a beautifully observed picture of the twists and turns of life and of love.Our protagonist, Stephen, is a young black trumpet player, destined for great things until he flunks his exams, forcing a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is possibly not ideal viewing for a spell of sunny weather in June, but Jack Thorne’s drama about a family trying to cope with a terminally ill child is as compelling as it’s painful. Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen star as parents Andrew and Nicci, and Best Interests probes their private agony in piercingly intimate detail, but the focus also pulls out to encompass prickly issues of ethics, morality and the labyrinthine innards of the NHS.It might have ended up as a preachy, finger-pointing litany of sclerotic bureaucracy and entrenched attitudes, but Thorne’s writing and an excellent Read more ...
David Nice
Founded two decades ago by Franco Buitoni and his wife Ilaria in league with their good friend Mitsuko Uchida, the Borletti-Buitoni Trust never seems to put a foot wrong in its choices: the present and future are as dazzling as the last 20 years. As well as giving generous long-term support to over 200 artists and groups, BBT commissions new works – more than 50 to date – and has set up a Communities wing "to encourage social cohesion".Which is how this weekend started off in Peckham’s Multi-Storey Car Park with a gobsmackingly brilliant event. Composer Kate Whitley has written eloquently on Read more ...
Anya Ryan
Twenty-one years ago, critics were alarmed by Ben Elton’s deranged musical We Will Rock You. But, despite the "staggeringly awful" reviews, the show somehow went on to have 12 long (and painful) years of West End success. So, here we are again. The car crash of a show is back for a summer run at the London Coliseum. But has it made any progress in its nine-year hiatus? Sadly not.And in many ways, why should it? The Queen musical has collected more than its fair share of loyal devotees over the years. But, with a totally nonsensical plot, cringeworthy dialogue and songs shoehorned into the Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Of all the Scottish bands to be name dropped at a Chvrches gig, the Bay City Rollers would be far down the list. Thankfully singer Lauren Mayberry was only citing the 70s group in reference to her tartan outfit, and not a surprise cover of “Shang-A-Lang”, but the Glasgow trio do share another similarity, in that they’ve proved to have considerable staying power in the pop world.As Mayberry noted later in the set, the 10th anniversary of their debut album is approaching later this year, but this night, the second of two homecoming shows, was more focused around the present rather than a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The short story F Scott Fitzgerald wrote as a challenge, of a man born 70 years old whose body gets younger as the years pass, has already been blown up into a lengthy film of the same name starring Brad Pitt (and lots of CGI). Jethro Compton decided a bare-bones musical for six multi-instrumentalists and no special effects was what it needed to be, and how well it works.Four years on, for its second run at Southwark Playhouse, Compton is directing a cast that has ballooned to 12, who ably accompany themselves on a wide range of instruments (brass, wind, strings, keyboards, percussion) as Read more ...