Reviews
graham.rickson
This new production of Handel’s Alcina opens well, with no preamble, the protagonists’ arrival on the island inhabited by the titular sorceress suggested by footage of rushing water projected onto the backdrop. This is billed as Opera North’s first sustainable production, the costumes, furniture and props all second-hand.Designer Hannah Clark’s “Heaven on Earth” is little more than a patch of linoleum littered with scruffy office chairs and the characters are in modern dress, their mismatched outfits seemingly sourced from a charity shop. Thankfully, video designer William Galloway’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Lingui” is the Chadian word for “sacred bonds, the common thread”, a social ideal put to the test here by an illegal abortion. Director Mahamet-Saleh Haroun – Chad’s artistic conscience, best-known for A Screaming Man – focuses for the first time on the sort of strong women who raised him, as they wage guerrilla war against cultural and religious strictures. Backstreet abortions were staples of ‘60s British kitchen-sink cinema, signifying grim, grey working-class reality. Haroun’s approach is very different, showing resilience, not bleak despair.We meet our heroine Amina (Achouackh Abakar Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Path of Miracles is a serious, hefty 65-minute choral work about the traditional Catholic pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by – and there is a slight cognitive dissonance here – Joby Talbot, the composer of, among other things, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film. But although it sounds forbidding as a concept it is anything but in performance, where it is engrossing, textured, emotionally engaging and dramatic. Path of Miracles is a mighty sing, and an ambitious project for any choir to take on, but the Elysian Singers tackled it with commitment and skill.Path of Miracles was Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nowadays, the jokes almost write themselves. As each new revelation of the Bacchanalia at 10 Downing Street appears (with much more to come, no doubt), political comics like Matt Forde must rub their hands with glee. It's almost as if he can just state the facts of what has come out that day, do a honk-honk sound and we'll know he's talking about our clown-car government. Thankfully, in his podcast The Political Party, he does more than that.This series' fortnightly podcasts are being recorded at the Duchess Theatre in London, and the audience get more bangs for their buck as they watch the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For America’s oldies radio stations Sammi Smith will forever be about “Help me Make it Through the Night”. In 1970, she was the first singer to pick up on the Kris Kristofferson song. Her version took it into the US Top Ten.Although “Help me Make it Through the Night” was an important calling card for Kristofferson with mainstream America, Smith never again figured strongly on the mainstream charts though she remained and had been a regular on the country listings since 1968. As is made clear by a new collection aimed at more that the country audience, she was a singular artist.Last summer, " Read more ...
David Nice
One thing’s clear from Irish National Opera’s bold championship of Vivaldi: he’s his own man when it comes to the stage, not some baroque generic, even if Bajazet is a pasticcio incorporating other composers’ music. He doesn’t characterize through arias as keenly as Handel, but his string writing is unique, and what a revelation to have Peter Whelan’s inspirational guidance from the harpsichord of 10 other players in the Irish Baroque Orchestra.Visually, there's much to admire. Molly O'Cathain's tarnished gold-and-wood set helps the singers to project - it's perfect for touring - and works Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Twelve years may have passed since her earthly demise, but you still hear people say they saw Pina Bausch the other night. Bausch remains synonymous with the company she founded, Tanztheater Wuppertal, and with a style of dance theatre that launched an entire new category. Filled with a brooding sense of the past, often specifically Germany’s past, Bausch’s works are less like ballets, more like choreographed group-psychotherapy. Dressed formally, as if for an evening out in the 1930s, her performers parade their secret frustrations and desires, blurt out verbal confessions or enact Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Almodóvar has rarely returned to the petrified Spain of his youth, flinging off Franco’s oppression by ignoring it in his early films of freewheeling provocation, where anarchic, hot freedom was all of the law. In this sober tale of secrets and lies, though, his nation’s past is literally dug up.Janis (Penélope Cruz) is a photographer living a chic Madrid life, but the village where she was raised is still haunted by the Fascist murder of her great-grandfather and others. Dishy forensic archaeologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde) agrees to help find the bodies, and in elegantly edited elisions we Read more ...
David Nice
“This symphony comprises 11 songs about death and lasts about one hour,” the conductor Mark Wigglesworth declared before a second New York performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth – people had left in droves during the first – only to see a swathe of his audience look anxiously at their watches.I doubt if anyone in an obviously more receptive and surprisingly youthful Barbican audience did that at any point during Gianandrea Noseda’s interpretation at the Barbican last night, which drew focus from start to finish. So did his Beethoven Seventh after the interval in a daring but triumphant Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
US televangelists Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker’s rise and spectacular fall from grace in the Seventies and Eighties has already been covered in a documentary film of the same name, released in 2000 with a voice-over by RuPaul.Why, you may ask, another one now? This biopic, directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick; Search Party; Wet Hot American Summer) starring Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye – she was inspired by the original, bought the rights to Tammy Faye's life and immersed herself in all things Tammy for seven years – with Andrew Garfield as Jim, doesn’t adequately answer that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time continues to be kind to A Number, the astonishing 2002 play by Caryl Churchill that reaps fresh rewards with every viewing. Revived just prior to the pandemic at the Bridge, here it is anew at the Old Vic, in a smart reappraisal by the director Lyndsey Turner who seems to be making her way through the canon of Britain's most adventurous and invaluable playwright, now 83. This play can withstand varying degrees of realism, having been birthed at the Royal Court in a scalpel-sharp rendition from Stephen Daldry that was pretty much entirely abstract. Turner, by contrast, gives us a Read more ...
David Nice
Mozart’s early violin concertos are precociously well-tailored and full of fun ideas, but are they “teenage masterpieces”, as Julia Fischer asserts? That special honour goes to the likes of Mendelssohn’s Octet and the most famous of Schubert’s 1815 songs.Nor can I imagine pulses quickening at the thought of Fischer presenting all five of the concertos within a short space of time as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Artist-in-Residence. Even so, the two we heard last night were given impeccable phrasing, variety of tone and inflection, everything you could wish from the most cultured of Read more ...