LJ's dream has come true - she has her very own wine bar. Unfortunately for us, it turns into a bit of a nightmare.This new musical open on a nostalgic 70s vibe. Tables and chairs fill almost all of Southwark Playhouse's smaller space, a set that conjures memories of the sitcom from that period, Robin's Nest, or the infamous dining room at Fawlty Towers; recent films such as Boiling Point have also found comparable environments fertile ground for exploring the narrow line between comedy and tragedy.Initially we focus on LJ herself, Mischief theatre alum Nancy Zamit's harassed manager Read more ...

The trailer for Panah Panahi’s award-winning first feature Hit the Road is one of the most misleading I’ve yet seen thanks to its jaunty Western pop soundtrack and reassuring caption that the movie resembles an Iranian Little Miss Sunshine.Yes, it’s a pleasurable road movie dealing with a bickering family packed into a car and making a trip that will affect all their lives, and they do burst into communal singing from time to time. But the music they enjoy are songs from pre-Revolution Iran, and for all the comic delights en route, the film has a deeper political resonance than most Read more ...

Katia and Maurice Krafft spent their married life going from one volcanic eruption to the next. These self-styled “volcano runners” were not just thrill seekers, but serious volcanologists keen to gain a better understanding of how volcanoes work so as to further science and save lives.Sara Dosa’s documentary about the couple from Alsace, who bonded over their singular obsession, is created mainly from footage shot by Maurice (and colleagues) along with glorious stills by Katia. Over a career lasting 23 years, the couple diligently recorded everything they witnessed and Dosa had access to Read more ...

The giraffe still baffles me. This model beast appeared stage right at the Royal Albert Hall during Jennifer Walshe’s The Site of an Investigation, only to be loudly wrapped by a pair of percussionists and then removed. A critique of mindless consumerism, a satire on the destructive domination of nature (both among this work’s sprawl of themes), or a little absurdist interlude of the kind Walshe evidently enjoys? Never mind: we soon moved on to another mind-scrambling stunt in the genre-busting performance for voice and orchestra that the Irish composer staged for the Proms with the BBC Read more ...

This bold reimagining of Sally Cookson’s innovative 2017 production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe swoops into Drury Lane from a triumphant national tour. Where Cookson gently and skilfully detached CS Lewis’s original from its Christian middle-class roots with its playful references to quantum physics and the moon-landings, here director Michael Fentiman adds va-va voom to the action with a dynamic design and a multi-talented musical cast.We live in a different world, of course, to the world of 2017; and as the production opens with a hauntingly evocative performance of We’ll Meet Read more ...

If jukebox shows occupy one end of the musical theatre spectrum and Stephen Sondheim's masterpieces the other, Sister Act The Musical is somewhere in-between.We get songs we know (Alan Menken's score, heard first on the West End and then, in 2011, on Broadway, includes many staples of talent shows and daytime radio), stunt casting for name recognition and, best of all for a production delayed for two years by Covid, a confident showmanship that screams "entertainment"! If you can afford to be sniffy about such blatant commerciality in these straitened times, then good for you!The director Read more ...

Over the past few years, Joe Pera Talks With You has been one of television’s joys. Each episode finds the small-town American music teacher navigating life in Upper Michigan. Unhurriedly, with good humour, he deals with the day-to-day small things. The big things are more complicated, but he finds his way. Every programme is a warm bath in goodness.Joe Pera himself is a stand-up comedian who has created the character with his own name. Now, he has directed the promo film for “Hank” from Philadelphia band Friendship’s fourth album Love the Stranger. An older man goes by boat to Little Read more ...

 FRIDAY 22 JULY by Caspar GomezWhen my regular festival pal Finetime and I have set up the wibbly, inflatable-poled tents he bought from Lidl, we settle to drinks, his from a chill-box, mine from a 35-pint container of Pilton Labyrinth scrumpy. We attune to the neighbours. Next to us is a tent-corral proudly flying a flag featuring a pink unicorn with penises for legs, spunking out rainbows. They are discussing the history of the Soviet Sputnik programme of the late 1950s. The people from the tents next door, that is. Not the unicorn’s penis-legs.As we will learn, this is the way people Read more ...

When I first came to Estonia with a then still-exiled Neeme Järvi and his Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in 1989, the world-class young musicians who dazzled at this year’s Pärnu Music Festival hadn’t been born.A new Estonian musical golden age is now reaping the benefits of a superlative musical education system, but experience also counts: the central force that makes this festival the most welcoming I’ve ever experienced, Paavo Järvi, will be 60 this year; father Neeme, back in Estonia’s lovely summer capital by the Baltic after two years’ enforced absence, and brother Kristjan marked their Read more ...

While Britain is experiencing a "summer of discontent", with inflation, strikes and other conflicts, it is odd that so few plays are as overtly political, and as overtly resonant as Sonali Bhattacharyya’s Chasing Hares, which won the activist Theatre Uncut’s Political Playwriting Award, and is now on the main stage at the Young Vic.Although the play is set in Kolkata in the 2000s, it makes connections with Britain today, and includes a passionate argument in praise of the power of theatre to change people’s attitudes. The story focuses on Prab, a machine operator in a West Bengali factory who Read more ...

There's further training, shall we say, still needed on 101 Dalmatians, the much-delayed show that marks the second consecutive musical this summer at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, following their revisionist Legally Blonde.A busy, bustling title that takes ages to come into focus, Timothy Sheader's production feels like a work-in-progress, even if the puppetry work from the busy Toby Olié (concurrently represented by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) as it is could scarcely be bettered. Is the piece worth pursuing further? You bet, not least because of the enduring Read more ...

Once upon a time the Three Choirs Festival conjured up a single image, that of the English Oratorio – the grand choral solemnification of everything that was most profound in Anglican thought (though ironically its greatest exemplar, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, was irretrievably Catholic, and one Anglican bishop is supposed to have said he wouldn’t allow it into his cathedral). Today the festival’s image is more diverse, but it still sometimes hankers after the good old days, with their smug serenities and flowing pieties, and this revival of George Dyson’s 100-minute long Quo vadis, Read more ...