Reviews
Thomas H. Green
A few years ago it would have been hard to envisage proto-punk maniac Iggy Pop being a star feature of the EFG London Jazz Festival. His last few albums, though, have been heavily flecked with jazz, and let’s not forget that as far back as The Stooges’ 1970 album Funhouse, free jazz sax squalling was part of the mayhem. Tonight doesn’t veer into that kind of transgressive noisiness but is still far more than just, as the promotion suggests, a run-through of his often elegiac latest album Free.Once his band are onstage, including album co-creator, New York experimentalist Noveller (Sarah Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The pink, turquoise and orange world of Greener Grass is a riot of derangement. Here is the suburban dream gone haywire, where, out of politeness, a woman gives her baby to her friend because she admires it. Every adult wears braces, hair bleeds when you get it cut and a boy turns into a golden retriever (his father is delighted – at last he’s willing to run for the ball).There are echoes of The Truman Show, Stepford Wives and Desperate Housewives, even Dean Spanley, but Greener Grass is its own brand of surreal Americana, with a slice of Saturday Night Live thrown in. This is Jocelyn Read more ...
David Nice
No Joan of Arc means no Henry VI Part One. France, where we left the victorious Henry V - the superb Sarah Amankwah, a shining light of this company - in the Globe's summer history plays, only figures briefly in the last act of a candelelit, intimate stepping-back to the more problematic saga. It's earlier in terms of composition - though it seems strange that people used to reject Shakespeare's authorship - but in terms of historic kingship actually shows how everything about England and its French posessions fell apart with the advent of the introverted Henry VI. Concentrating on the second Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The four young men who comprise Darlingside met at Williams College, in the Berkshires which, each October, declares a “Mountain Day” when students hike up Stony Ledge and celebrate with donuts, cider and a cappella singing. Perhaps on one such hike was born the idea of a band and perhaps one day in the future the names of Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, Harris Paseltiner, and David Senft will be added to the roster of notable Williams alumnae that includes Elia Kazan, Stephen Sondheim and Michael Beschloss.Take a bow, Darlingside, who returned to Britain this week for just two dates. Named in Read more ...
Eyck, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - theremin takes centre stage
Robert Beale
The theremin is still a relatively rare visitor to concert halls, particularly in a solo role, but Carolina Eyck is changing that. Her instrument, invented by Lev Termen just 100 years ago, is a relatively simple piece of kit – a tone generator controlled by the player’s hands, which never touch it but rather appear to be conjuring sound out of thin air.In many ways its most daunting characteristic is the sheer range of sounds it can create. The right hand controls pitch, and that can vary over a wide range of the normally audible spectrum, with the distinctive notes of conventional scales or Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s bright, it’s brash, it’s a gazillion times camper than Christmas: but is it such stuff as theatrical hits are made on? If that misquotation is already making you cringe, then this glittery pop juggernaut probably isn’t for you – but it is, unashamedly, Shakespeare for the generation that grew up on TV talent shows. Created around the back catalogue of Swedish songwriter Max Martin, it’s a reworking of Romeo and Juliet that gives the tragic teenage heroine’s story an irreverent, 21st-century spin.The result is a jukebox musical with the broad humour and feelgood fairytale sentiment of a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Second album, second novel, second tour programme – the follow-up is always tricky. But the timing couldn’t be better for Acosta Danza, the Havana-based dance company which made its UK debut in 2017. These 20 young Cubans, handpicked by Carlos Acosta and bursting with talent, can’t know how badly the UK needs a shot of their sunny optimism right now.As before, the mode is eclectic, with a focus on the vibrant mishmash that is Cuban culture. Curiously, though, it doesn’t always arrive direct from the source. The strongest Latin American vibe on the programme comes courtesy of choreographer Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There aren’t many musicians who could appear as composer, singer and violist on a single programme but that was Caroline Shaw’s lot last night. As part of Kings Place’s Venus Unwrapped season, the first half comprised entirely her music, played by the Attacca Quartet and featuring Shaw as vocalist, and she then re-appeared with viola in hand after the interval for Mendelssohn’s second string quintet.Shaw was the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for her stunning vocal work Partita, written for the ensemble Roomful of Teeth, which I was really disappointed not to Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Frozen is possibly the most beloved Disney movie since the studio rediscovered its mojo in the 1990s. While picking up a couple of Oscars and laying waste to box office records, it had young girls immersing themselves in favourite characters and performing the songs on a dime.A sequel to that 2013 film was inevitable. And so with the same production team, composers and stars, we’re returning to Arendelle and its two royal sisters – one with magical powers, the other some good old-fashioned gumption, who make a formidable team when they’re not immersed in sibling squabbles. But Read more ...
Negar Esfandiary
Permission tells the story of Afrooz, the captain of Iran's National Futsal Team, who is stopped from joining her team at the Asia Cup Final because of the last minute whim of her estranged husband. It is based on Iranian football player Niloufar Ardalan, who in 2015 missed the Iran v Japan final of the Asia Games in Malaysia when her sports journalist husband Mahdi Toutounchi, enforced the right given to him by Islamic shar'ia law to prevent her from leaving the country.This second feature from director Soheil Beiraghi, described in his own Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ivo Graham's latest show The Game of Life follows on from his previous hour, in which he talked about passing a milestone in life and the prospect of starting a family. Now he is a dad, and uses domestic detail as the starting point for some fine observational comedy about fatherhood, class and politics.There are teasing glimpses into his background. Graham comes from a “family of squares with me the occasional rhombus” and while he may describe himself as weak and pathetic in one routine, his comedy gets meatier with each show. He is usually the fall-guy, as when he recounts the toe- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to a powerful cast and crisp direction from Brian Kirk (Game of Thrones, Luther), 21 Bridges drives home its story of good cops, bad cops and a Big Apple rotten to the core with bulldozing force. Centre stage is Chadwick Boseman as Andre Davis, a detective renowned for showing bad guys no mercy. His record of shooting an alarming tally of felons has earned him a grilling by Internal Affairs, but Cool Hand Andre insists every killing was justified. Like his ailing old mother tells him, “you got to look the devil in the eye.”The son of a dedicated policeman killed in the line of duty, Read more ...