Reviews
Gary Naylor
If you saw Upstart Crow on television or on stage in the West End, you’ll know the schtick of Sheldon Epps’ dazzling show Play On! Take a Shakespearean play’s underlying plot and characters and relocate them for wit and giggles. “Make it a musical“, you say? Okay, but who’s going to do the score, who’s going to dare to follow in the footsteps of Lenny and Steve, of Cole, of Elton (okay that one came a bit later)? “Duke Ellington!” Right. You’ve sold it.And away we go, the opener suggesting Twelfth Night on 42nd Street as a kid full of moxie and talent pitches up at The Cotton Club in the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe, Amy Gledhill won best show for Make Me Look Fit on the Poster, ostensibly a cheery collection of stories about the weird and wonderful things that happen to her. But under the guise of feelgood comedy with herself as the butt of many of the gags, Gledhill cleverly weaves in a thoughtful study of female body image and self-esteem.Her Soho residency is the last stage of the Hull comic's sellout post-Fringe tour, and she immediately establishes a rapport with the audience, encouraging them to throw knickers at her as if she were a rock star of a certain vintage ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After co-fronting Vinegar Joe with Robert Palmer, Elkie Brooks first charted as a solo artist in 1977 with “Pearl’s a Singer.” Yet there was more to her musical past than the 1971 to 1974 spell in the blues-rock outfit. Her contributions to You Got Me Hooked! - More Marylebone Beat Girls are “He's Gotta Love me” and “Stop the Music” – both released a decade before “Pearl’s a Singer.”“He's Gotta Love me” was the June 1965 A-side of her fourth single. “Stop the Music” was the B-side of her February 1966 sixth single. Each is a top-drawer uptown soul-pop nugget with a strong tune, driving rhythm Read more ...
David Nice
At the end of an exhausting week in which Holocaust Memorial Day struck a more urgent note than ever as fascism started tearing through the USA, parts of this concert were bound to hit hard. That they did so to the power of 100 was thanks to the extraordinary impact of Jakub Hrůša, now recognised as one of the greats by British audiences as he waits to take up the full-time reins at the Royal Opera. The BBC Symphony Orchestra burned for him in fullest focus.Shostakovich’s Eleventh is one of his symphonies which require special pleading (which is much better than bad, the only adjective to Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest from the This Is Us creator, Dan Fogelman, is a futuristic take on relationships among survivors once Earth has suffered an extinction event, a popular concept in these troubled times. Except that it starts out by following an equally popular narrative track, the classic locked-door whodunit. Where is this heading? After watching the first three episodes released so far by Disney+, I honestly can’t tell.We are in what seems to be a fairly upscale American suburb. An athletic Black man (Sterling K Brown) we have watched wake up, get dressed and go running checks in with Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just now, music about survival, transcendence and the afterlife may have a special resonance for the BBC Singers. After all, the supremely versatile century-old chamber choir has endured its own near-death experience – at the hands of the BBC top brass who, in 2023, planned to axe them.At Kings Place, with the Aurora Orchestra and its conductor Nicholas Collon, the Singers made a typically refined and resourceful contribution to a concert in the venue “Earth Unwrapped” strand. Sense and spirit merged in a programme that began with three a cappella numbers and concluded with the 1893, chamber- Read more ...
David Nice
A colleague once told me that I shouldn’t take Mike Leigh’s films with contemporary settings as slices of everyday life. He was right: they’re hyperreal. Especially Hard Truths, in which his take on a woman both depressed and angry – it’s possible to be both more or less simultaneously – packs years of grievances and unacceptable verbal abuse into a very short period of time.Fortunately Marianne Jean-Baptiste is on hand to elevate the attacks to sacred monster level – plenty of laugh-out-loud lines, and I won’t spoil what fun's to be had by quoting any – and to make the pathos real. Pansy‘s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.To capture the anarchic birth of this TV institution, Jason Reitman has made a stylish film that initially seems as wayward as the show. But it gradually comes to seem like the obvious way to handle the material.He has opted to depict just the 90 minutes before the show was due to go live, a real-time madcap sprint to the moment when the first sketch rolled and Chevy Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How excited Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton must have been to learn that the venue for their Inside No 9 stage show was haunted, by an actress killed onstage there in 1921 when a death scene went fatally wrong. How very them.“Bloody Belle”, dressed in white and doused in blood, duly makes regular angry appearances in their two-hour show, weaving her way niftily into a rehearsal of the same play that supposedly did for Belle, Terror in the Asylum, about a mad homicidal doctor with a decapitated wife. Naturally, nothing is straightforward about this rehearsal, or many other elements in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As Stoke-on-Trent’s Formal Sppeedwear immerse themselves in what turns out to be their penultimate song, they become lost in the music. What they are playing takes over. Revolving guitar motifs spray forth like light reflected from a glitter ball. An elastic bass guitar bubbles, the frill-free drumming is hard, precise and about forward motion.They are playing “Bunto,” the lead track from their May 2024 EP, a four-track 12-incher. The live experience confirms that Formal Sppeedwear are fully formed, a band knowing exactly what it’s doing. Everything meshes, forming a seamless whole. Add in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Leeds-based Northern Ballet has built a reputation as a source of fine dancers who are also impressive actors. Federico Bonelli, the former Royal Ballet principal who took over its directorship in 2022, is proving a worthy steward of this tradition. The company’s latest visit to London is a triple bill of “shorts’, one almost 50 years old, the other two commissioned by Bonelli. Together they make an extremely satisfying menu.Opening the bill, Rudi Van Dantzig’s 1977 Four Last Songs, to Richard Strauss’s music, is a piece in the same vein as Macmillan’s Song of the Earth, with the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I lead a peaceful, idle life, running a bookstore in Gangneung. Honestly, no customers.” Chu Si-eon (Kwon Hae-hyo) is genial and self-deprecating but he was previously a well-known actor and director before he criticised the authorities and was forced to lay low.Now he’s directing a short drama for a few university students in Seoul in a class taught by his niece, the reticent, charming Jeonim (Kim Min-hee), who’s asked him to help out, though she assumed he’d say no. The previous director has just left due to embarrassing circumstances – he dated three of his students separately, so they’ve Read more ...