Reviews
David Nice
If you’ve loved every episode of Ben Elton’s Shakespeare and Co comedy, you’ll know what to expect – but you’ll have to swallow bittersweet pills from only two of the excellent ensemble who’ve given us such comfort and joyous rapid-fire delivery of wordsmithery over three series (and on the London stage, as it was before mid-March). Anyone unfamiliar with the format must also watch the previous Christmas special on the BBC iPlayer, where Will writes sonnet lines for Anne and works on Eighth Night for Burbage, Condell and Kemp(e) to present before the Queen: a much more fleshly entertainment, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As proof that you can't have too much of a good thing, consider the return of Matthew Warchus's buoyant production of A Christmas Carol, now marking its fourth year at the Old Vic (with a lauded Broadway run last Christmas included, for good measure). But I would wager that neither Warchus nor his savvy adapter, Jack Thorne, ever thought that a production making a real virtue of inclusion would be playing this time out to an empty auditorium.Such are the dictates of the pandemic, however, that the show is closing out the ambitious In Camera series at this address allowing access in absentia Read more ...
stephen.walsh
List all the problems that the pandemic places in the way of operatic performance, and you might well end up wondering why anyone would bother. Opera Ensemble, however, have bothered, in the shape of an accomplished and moving production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, stripped down in a variety of ways, deprived of its normal house-mate, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, and accompanied by a band in various degrees of shrinkage: a piano trio when the production opened at St.James’s Church, Islington, in October, and for a couple of performances at the Grange Festival earlier this month, nothing Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Pixar's recent work raises the question, how much overt spiritual guidance do you want in your animation? In their latest film, Soul, middle-school music teacher Joe (Jamie Foxx) aspires to play New York’s famed jazz clubs but is living hand to mouth. On the same day he’s offered a full time teaching post, he also scores a dream gig playing at the Half Note with a top band. It’s no wonder that a random street accident sees him unwilling to ascend the escalator to Heaven (someone at Pixar has been watching A Matter of Life and Death).Instead Joe jumps into the limbo-land of The Great Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Cinderella ****I did worry that pantomime – that most audience-driven of theatrical pursuits – might not work through the tube, but Nottingham Playhouse's warm and funny show dispels any doubts. Pandemic jokes abound (the audience must be smelly because they're sitting far apart, for instance) in writer-director Adam Penford's inventive romp.The cast of seven inject a lot of energy into the show as distances must be kept on stage – the Prince (David Albury) and Cinderella (Gabrielle Brooks) can't share even a chaste kiss – but that doesn't stop the fun. Sara Poyzer as Fairy Godmother and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The winter solstice occurs tomorrow, 21 December. Stonehenge, one of this island’s most significant structures, is constructed in alignment with the setting sun on that day. After the solstice, the days lengthen and a new cycle of the year begins.An image of what could be Stonehenge appears inside the back cover of the booklet coming with Sumer Is Icumen In – The Pagan Sound Of British & Irish Folk 1966–1975. Inside its front cover, a similar edifice is seen. Within it, a circle of woman kneel each with arms outstretched. The image is taken from the 1973 film, The Wicker Man and the Read more ...
David Nice
Adaptability backed up by funding has been the course of the most successful musical organisations since mid-March – but it’s been especially tough from November onwards. One abrupt lockdown meant that anything scheduled to be performed before a carefully limited live audience within or around that month bit the dust, and the London Symphony Orchestra’s series planned to match Beethoven piano concertos with Stravinsky’s smaller-scale orchestral works at the Barbican with Krystian Zimerman as soloist and Simon Rattle conducting was a major casualty. So was the Beethoven concertos marathon Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pairing of Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Superman’s surrogate parents in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice did not go unnoticed, and here writer/director Thomas Bezucha has reunited them as Montana residents George and Margaret Blackledge. He’s a retired sheriff, she’s a former horse-trainer, and now their lives revolve around their son James, his wife Lorna and their baby son Jimmy.In the early sequences, Let Him Go (adapted from Larry Watson’s novel) looks as though it has a sort of On Golden Pond vibe going on, a sentimental story of growing older, changing Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There was always bound to be a hint of melancholy watching George Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Try as you might to focus on the film, you can never quite shake the fact that you’re watching the final performance of Chadwick Boseman, whose life was cut tragically short this year from bowel cancer. This adaptation of Wilson’s play is the second in a ten-part cycle that chronicles the Black experience throughout the course of the 20th century. It’s produced by Denzel Washington, who himself starred in Fences, another Wilson play, back in 2016. This chapter focuses on the life of Ma Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A person in a brown polo neck turns away, looking down (pictured below right). The encounter feels really intimate; we are almost breathing down this beautiful neck and exquisitely painted ear. Yet the subject retains their privacy; you can’t even be sure if this is a man or a woman.Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints people, yet her pictures are not portraits. They are not drawn from life, but from her imagination and the store of images inhabiting her mind. Her subjects are not sitters, posing at her behest, but characters minding their own business and getting on with their lives. Such an Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just before the doors closed again on live audiences at the Wigmore Hall, Iestyn Davies and members of the Arcangelo ensemble celebrated the private side of a very public composer. The peerless counter-tenor, whose powerfully polished command of phrase and line makes this music feel as natural and necessary as breathing, sang Handel’s nine German-language arias to pious texts by Bartold Heinrich Brockes (who also wrote the words to the “Brockes Passion”). In between clusters of songs, the Arcangelo players – violinist Matthew Truscott, lutenist Thomas Dunford and cellist Jonathan Manson, with Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
At just under five hours, Troy Story, the RSC’s adaptation of as many tales from Greek myth, takes about a third as long as it does to recite the whole of the Iliad. It feels like longer. Gregory Doran’s production is ambitious in its starkness, but never quite manages to break out of the plodding rhythm of its lines – or to bring the stories into the 21st century. (The venture, undertaken without sets or costumes, was livestreamed this past weekend and is available through Saturday to ticket-holders via catch-up.) Unlike Homer, Doran and dramaturges Cathleen McCarron and Anna McSweeney Read more ...