Reviews
Veronica Lee
With the politics of hate alive and well both sides of the Atlantic, this seems a good time to revive Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's 2003 musical, which is set in Civil Rights-era Louisiana. This production was first seen at Chichester Minerva Theatre last year and transfers to the West End via a run at Hampstead Theatre and has a stand-out central performance by Sharon D Clarke.Inspired in part by Kushner’s own Southern Jewish childhood, Caroline, or Change is almost entirely sung-through and Clarke (pictured below) is the titular black maid who is paid a pittance by the Gellman family to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If you’re looking for a Christmas with more pagan edge than saccharine cheer, where the wolves are howling and the mythological characters are steeped in the terror and mystery of winter’s long dark nights, then make haste to Wilton’s Music Hall. For the second year running, this adaptation of John Masefield’s chillingly beautiful 1935 novel – in which a child with a magical box is caught up in an elemental battle between good and evil – takes audiences on a darkly thrilling quest to save Christmas.From the moment you walk into the auditorium of Wilton’s Music Hall, where the gloaming is Read more ...
David Nice
Like the fountains that sprang up in the desert during the Holy Family's flight into Egypt - according to a charming episode in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew - Berlioz's new-found creativity in the 1850s flowed from a couple of bars of organ music he inscribed in a friend's visitors book. That became the Shepherd's Farewell to Mary, Joseph and Jesus as they depart from Bethlehem, loveliest of all Christmas carols; then Berlioz added two movements around it, and later two low-level dramatic sequences either side of "The Flight into Egypt" (the scene pictured below by Carpaccio). The triptych - Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s about to begin. The final performance on the final night – and only UK date – of the European Apocalypse package tour featuring four extreme metal bands. The 1,700 capacity Roundhouse is sold out. Touts outside are scrabbling for tickets. A curtain covers the stagefront. A procession of images flicker across it; ancient art, demons, gods and hellish conflict. Then the screen goes black. In large white gothic letters, words in sequence: LONDON. PREPARE. TO. GET. DESTROYED. The curtain drops. The white-light silhouetted forms of German thrash juggernaut Kreator pounce in at a velocity Read more ...
Mahan Esfahani / Richard Goode, Wigmore Hall review - clarity and contrast from two keyboard masters
Sebastian Scotney
Two successive nights, two contrasted solo keyboard recitals at the Wigmore Hall: not great for the knees but marvellous for the soul. On Saturday the Tehran-born, US-raised harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani continued a mammoth project: he has been invited by the Wigmore Hall to present more or less the entirety of Bach’s works for harpsichord over five seasons. The series started with the Goldberg Variations, and in the current season, he is working his way through all of the Partitas, with further instalments to come in March and July. It is a series which really brings to life Beethoven’s idea Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Tell-Tale Heart may be the title of an 1843 short story by Edgar Allen Poe, but rest assured that Anthony Neilson's adaptation of it for the National contains this theatre maverick's signature throughout. To be sure, the play charts a Poe-esque hallucinatory fall from sanity of an award-winning playwright called Celeste (or is it Camille, given the dualities in which the play revels). But the gathering grand guignol comes accompanied by multiple riffs on everything from the current hit revival of Company to the National itself, not to mention a first-act focus on excrement reminiscent of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul Merton has a lot of strings to his bow – stand-up, improv artist, historian of silent-movie-era comedy, quiz-show panellist, to name a few – and now he adds pantomime dame to his CV. He has appeared in television pantos before, but this is his first live outing, as Widow Twankey in Aladdin. What took him so long?After a hesitant start, Merton's command of the role grows and he throws in the odd line to keep the company on their toes (he is credited with supplying extra material for panto veteran Alan McHugh's script). His laidback Widow Twankey is less showy, in voice and costume, than Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Like a supermarket "Christmas Dinner" sandwich, cramming the delights of a full festive lunch into every bite, Epiphoni Consort’s The Christmas Truce was at once historical play, choral concert and carol service, and so wonderfully enjoyable I didn’t want it to end.It was also for me the discovery of another great London-based choir. Founded in 2014 by conductor Tim Reader, Epiphoni (pictured below by Kaupo Kikkas) is peopled predominantly by young singers with advanced vocal training who have followed careers outside music. They make a terrific sound: the upper voices are very good, the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is 1914 – a fateful year for assassinations, war and revolution. The fictional Erast Petrovich Fandorin, the protagonist of Boris Akunin’s series of historical thrillers, is an elegant, eccentric sometime government servant, spy and diplomat, as well as engineer, independent detective and free spirit. He is a completely assured personality, who nevertheless stammers in ordinary conversation. And he is very fond of risk.This well-travelled Muscovite is visiting Yalta to pay homage to the memory of his hero, Chekhov, thus already utilising the mix of real history and fiction that is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In April 1973, John Peel wrote that “For my money, Tangerine Dream are the best of the Kosmische Music bands. Whenever any of their extended works are played on the radio there is a heavy mail from listeners. Most of the letter-writers are for it, those that are against it are very against it indeed. A Tangerine Dream track, heard superficially, is little more than a repetitive drone. Closer listening reveals a constantly shifting and evolving pattern – something like Terry Riley’s In C.”Peel began playing Tangerine Dream on his radio show in Autumn 1972 and went on to choose their fourth Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Matthew Bourne Swan Lake has become a classic. And – lest that word conjure up dusty tomes and a niggling sense of obligation – this is definitively not the old-but-worthy, improving-but-dull kind of classic. This is the "where has this been all my life" kind, the "I've got to tell all my friends and relations" kind, the "blimey, I'd forgotten dance could be so good" kind.Twenty-three years – and many revivals – have come and gone since the male swans first went a-swimming in 1995, and Bourne and designer Lez Brotherston have given the show a face-lift for this run, updating some costumes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Wow! First, the Black Panther team took cinema by storm; now, they have conquered theatre as well. Or, at least, two of them have. The Convert has been written by actor and playwright Danai Gurira (Okoye), and stars Letitia Wright (Shuri). Originally staged in the United States in 2012, and currently part of Kwame Kwei-Armah's first season at the Young Vic, this three-hour historical epic, which tells the harrowing story of an African Catholic believer's attempt to convert a young black woman in colonial South-East Africa, has a great cast which also includes Ivanno Jeremiah, Wright's Read more ...