Reviews
Gary Naylor
If Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1966 was anyone under the age of 25, why couldn’t a teenage student write a musical in 1967? There are plenty of answers to that question of course, none of which stopped the composer Stephen Schwartz, who conjured Pippin while still at Carnegie Mellon University. By 1972, with a little help from Bob Fosse, the show was on Broadway. And now it’s back in London, having been seen here as recently as last summer. The work has lost none of its craziness in the half-century or so since it was first picking up Tonys. Pippin himself is still a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Crisis-management has always been part of a choreographer’s skillset, but staging a new ballet with two large alternating casts has rarely been fraught with so much risk. It was one hell of a week for Valentino Zucchetti, first soloist at the Royal Ballet and creator of Anemoi, the 20-minute work that opens the final programme in the company’s 90th birthday season. In the last days of rehearsals the 33-year-old was already on the back foot, re-jigging sections of the piece as several dancers fell prey to injury. Then, 24 hours before opening night, disaster struck and half his cast were Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a wonderful thing to hear a nine-piece Broadway-style band at full pelt, and to see real show dancing – the first time for me, in both cases, since early 2020. Wonderful, too, is this sassiest of 1950s musicals, for which those great lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green deserve almost as much credit as Bernstein for his incomparable melodies – all of them winners, melded into a musical whole which keeps the interest through the picaresque adventures of two girls from Ohio in and around New York’s Greenwich Village.Let’s get the big hitch over with first: you can’t hear enough of the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Edinburgh-based Dunedin Consort are regular visitors to the Wigmore Hall, and their concert on Saturday night was greeting by a full house. In these Covid times, that meant an audience of just 200, but from the applause, they were clearly enthusiastic for John Butt’s programme, centred around two Bach favourites, the D minor Two-Violin Concerto and the cantata Ich habe genug. The ensemble is a period instrument orchestra who play one to a part. That is a controversial choice in Bach, as there is little evidence that he used such small groups himself. However, it suits the generous Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michelle Pfeiffer all but purrs her way through French Exit, as befits a splendid actress who cut a memorable Catwoman onscreen nearly thirty years ago. Playing a New York grande dame who deals with bankruptcy by decamping with her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) to Paris, Pfeiffer informs the character of the mortality-obsessed Frances Price with an implicit "meow", as if forever finding fault with a world in which, short of funds, she is now surplus to requirements.Pfeiffer is the star attraction of Azazel Jacobs's film, which she powers her way through as if playing a longlost Tennessee Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Instability coursed through the Yardbirds in 1966. When their first studio album Yardbirds was issued in July, the band seen on stage was not the one which had made the album. Bassist and in-house producer Paul Samwell-Smith had left between its recording and release. His replacement was session player Jimmy Page. In time, Page switched to guitar to play alongside Jeff Beck, and guitarist Chris Dreja moved to bass. Next, Beck was off and the new four-piece Yardbirds had one guitarist: Jimmy Page. All this happened between mid-June and the end of November 1966.There had already been upsets. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Originally designed as a Yuletide widescreen blockbuster, The Tomorrow War belatedly emerges on Amazon’s streaming service, which at least means you can hit the pause button during its immense 140-minute running time whenever you need a leak or a refill. Director Chris McKay's film is a loud and spectacular story of time-travel and impending armageddon with a bit of emotional window-dressing for good measure, but lets itself down by relying on too many ideas which have been explored better elsewhere.Nonetheless, the basic setup is quite arresting. Dan Forester (Chris Pratt), an Iraq combat Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
During early lockdown in 2020 Howard Goodall published an article pondering the role of the composer in a pandemic. His answer was that music has throughout history been successful at memorialising people and events, and that it could do so again. On the back of the article, the London Symphony Chorus invited Goodall to create such a piece for the care and health workers who had lost their lives to Covid. The first version of Never to Forget was released online in July 2020, the ‘virtual’ LSC singing the names of the then 122 workers who had died. A year later the piece has been expanded – Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
A cosmologist and a beekeeper walk into a barbecue. Or a wedding. The beekeeper is in a relationship, or married, or just out of a relationship, or married again. The cosmologist shares the secret of the universe with him: it’s impossible to lick the tip of your own elbow, because if you did, you would gain immortality. Somehow, the line works – sometimes.Constellations is a play told in fractures. Scenes crack apart and remake themselves constantly, a series of possible versions of the romance of Marianne (quantum theory enthusiast) and Roland (bee enthusiast). Written by Nick Payne, it was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year, Netflix released Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-part documentary about the notorious financier and convicted sex offender. Now, here’s a Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow (Sky Documentaries), a three-parter about the woman accused by Epstein’s victims of helping him entrap them in his sordid pit of vice. She faces charges of complicity with Epstein in the sexual abuse and trafficking of under-age girls, and is due to be tried this autumn. Her name is pronounced “Gillane”, apparently.The story exerts a sickly fascination, its toxic allure intensified by the conspiracy Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A revival of a multi-award winning musical, with a big star or two, may look like a safe choice to re-open London’s largest theatre, the Coliseum, but there was a tingle of jeopardy in the air, exemplified when the show catches you by surprise, the curtain rising when (surely) people remain in the bar? And then you notice (for the last time - hurrah!) that all those seats all around you are deliberately left unoccupied and the game’s afoot. And besides, we'd already been given a glossy, garish programme: the West End is back, baby! At first with this new reiteration of the Broadway Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Rory Graham’s first words as he comes on stage are: “Well this is a bit weird, isn't it? It's been a while.” After a run of cancelled gigs, the band haven’t performed live for a year and a half – which feels, says Rory, “a bit like missing a testicle.”Anatomy aside, we all get it. While I knew how much I had missed live music, the depth of intense emotional response to this band's sound and lyrics; the overwhelming energy connection between artist and audience and the transformative healing power of music is another level at this gig.There is a chemistry in the Jazz Cafe that I have never Read more ...