Reviews
Veronica Lee
Jack and the Beanstalk, Hackney Empire ★★★ It's always good news when Clive Rowe decides to don the frocks to play the Dame, and this year he has also taken over directing duties (with Tony Whittle), with a script written by Will Brenton. It's a straightforward retelling of the tale, pun-heavy – although I did miss the sauce that Rowe has brought to proceedings under previous writer Susie McKenna, and couldn't fathom why the Dame's love interest, Councillor Higginbottom (Whittle) was dressed as a Freddie Mercury tribute act.A giant has stolen Hackney-on-the Verge's musical harp and magic ring Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As we ride towards the holiday break on our magic reindeer, it’s time for one last theartsdesk on Vinyl, a seasonal special that, if you scroll down, contains all the usual up-to-date music reviews but, before that, takes a look at Yuletide-themed releases, reissues and heritage fare that might make great presents. As ever, all musical life newly pressed to plastic is here. Dive in.VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASONPatrik Fitzgerald featuring Lemur No Santa Clauses (Crispin Glover)This year’s VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASON top pick is by long lost new wave troubadour Patrik Fitzgerald. It’s only his Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
No playwright has a scalpel as sharp as James Graham’s when it comes to dissecting politics; he has a brilliance and edge that strips away all unnecessary material till the beating heart of the matter is revealed. His latest tour de force takes the pulse of 1968 America where – against a backdrop of anti-Vietnam protests and outrage at the assassination of Martin Luther King – right wing polemicist, William F Buckley, is embarking on a series of TV debates with liberal Gore Vidal.Graham’s fondness for origin stories is well-chronicled. Ink, for instance, his play about the rise of Rupert Read more ...
David Nice
Has there ever been a Cabaret as dangerous as this one? Rebecca Frecknall’s disorienting take on the Kander and Ebb classic pulls you in and spits you out in a reinvention that pushes or dissolves boundaries at every twist and turn.Transforming a theatre into the Kit Kat Club, Berlin, early 1930s, is nothing new: the Edinburgh University Theatre Company did it in their Bedlam home 40 years ago (I was merely a singing waiter; others more centre-stage have gone on to great things). Nostalgia doesn't, however, blind me to the fact that what's been done to the Playhouse Theatre may well have led Read more ...
David Nice
Time, place and performers gave this performance of Berlioz’s typically original “Sacred Trilogy” a special significance. Nothing in it is more striking, in choice of text and the music to illustrate it, than the scene where Hebrew refugees Mary, Joseph and their child arrive in Egyptian Sais and are rejected by two heartless households before a kind Ishmaelite receives them. St Martin-in-the-Fields supports people “away from homelessness”, while Saturday evening marked the start of a new partnership between John Eliot Gardiner, his Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras and the church. Its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At the beginning of November 1964, a form of changing of the guard was evident in the UK’s singles chart. The Dave Clark Five sat at number 25 with “Anyway You Want it,” the highest placing for their follow-up to “Thinking of You Baby.” Although they were four places lower at 29, The Pretty Things would have been happy as “Don’t Bring me Down,” their second single, was rising up the charts. One band represented a primal interpretation of the recently popular R&B sound, the other an uncomplicated take on Beat Boom tropes.The DC5 wouldn’t have been bothered by their relatively poor UK chart Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre has a good record in staging classic American drama by black playwrights. James Baldwin's The Amen Corner, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs have all had terrific new stagings. Now it’s the turn of activist writer Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, which was first successfully produced off-Broadway in 1955. By a grim irony, this play — which attacks the attitudes of white producers and directors towards black creatives — was itself a victim of racism: the proposed transfer to Broadway fell through because Childress wouldn’t tone Read more ...
Robert Beale
This is a story of an innocent who finds herself unexpectedly in a strange, unknown world. The same could be true for those in its audience.Scottish academia sets great store by the significance of folk tradition, and many are the books and papers on every aspect of the subject. It’s this that forms the background to The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart – the study of balladry, in particular – and a little gentle spoofing of that academic oeuvre gives the show its kick-off point.This may come as a bit of a surprise to those who don’t inhabit its world. It certainly did to me when I once Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American artist Kehinde Wiley may be best known for his photo-realist portrait of Barack Obama, but painting powerful black men is not the norm. More often he elevates people met on the street in Brooklyn, Dalston or Dakar to positions of pseudo authority by inserting them into pastiches of history paintings honouring the rich and powerful.A black guy replaces Napoleon, for instance, in Wiley’s take on Jean-Auguste Ingres’ 1806 portrait of the Emperor seated on his throne. Wiley’s model sits on Napoleon’s gorgeous ermine cape, but the red velvet robes and laurel wreath have been replaced by Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
According to local press, Yungblud’s fans had been queuing up outside the Barrowland throughout the day before each gig in his two-night Glasgow stint. If that was one indication of the reverence his following hold him in, another came early in this performance, when he briefly delayed “I Love You, Will You Marry Me” to allow an actual proposal to go ahead down at the front. If your songs are considered suitable for popping the question to, then you know you are connecting with people.That attachment is something that ran through this noisy, entertaining show, that veered between polished and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously whirling audiences into Pullman’s universe of daemons, damnable clerics and parallel worlds. Now he has collaborated with playwright Bryony Lavery to bring this fluent, fluid adaptation of the prequel to His Dark Materials – The Book of Dust – to the stage, delving into Pullman’s myth-infused landscape to create a compelling narrative for our times.Samuel Creasey plays Malcolm Polstead, the bookish wide-eyed 12-year-old who becomes embroiled in forces beyond Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The story of a woman with lung cancer that has metastasised to the brain is based on Norwegian director Maria Sødahl's own experience, which is a hopeful sign in itself. But you take nothing for granted in this honest, beautiful movie, which never strays into sentimental terminal-romance territory and is shot by Lars von Trier's regular DP Manuel Alberto Claro,It’s Christmas and comfort and joy is thin on the ground. Oslo choreographer Anja (the brilliant, vibrant Andrea Bræin Hovig) is desperate to avoid a repeat of last year, when she was in hospital, away from her six children – three of Read more ...