Reviews
Katie Colombus
Adele is resting her eyelids as the audience spills in, packing the 02, a huge video projection showing off those luscious eyelashes and dark eyeliner that have become synonymous with Adele style. Her eyes open as we hear the echoes of "Hello" before she appears on a small square stage in the middle of the auditorium, resplendent in a long, black, glittery gown. It's a spine-tingling, faultless rendition of the first hit from her most recent album.This live show combines the three albums, 19, 21 and 25 - Adele's greatest songs, sung to great effect in her hometown of London. Walking to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was an eye-popping moment of high-risk bravura at the climax of Happy Valley. Murderous detective John Wadsworth (Kevin Doyle) had finally been cornered on a railway bridge and was all for leaping off. Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), wheezing hard from the chase, tried to talk him away from the edge but hadn’t done the relevant training. Wadsworth had, however, with a 100 percent success rate to prove it. So she asked him what she ought to be saying, and he told her.No one but Sally Wainwright would dream of switching to comedy at such a juncture, and really it ought to Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
As settings for musical comedy go, this one promised some boom for your buck. Las Vegas in the early 1950s was just emerging as a magnet not only for hedonists and gamblers, mobsters and showgirls, but also for the personnel of America’s Atomic Energy Commission, engaged in fortnightly A-bomb tests over the Nevada desert.Too bad that this fascinating scenario should be squandered on a run-of-the-mill show that scurries frantically from one well-worn musical-comedy trope to another without once pausing to reflect on the wider issues. In 1952 the words “mutually assured destruction” hadn’t yet Read more ...
David Nice
Russian bells and spinning tops dominate Richard Jones's predictably unpredictable take on Musorgsky's saga of a conscience-stricken Tsar. Latter-day purism tends to insist on the composer's seven-scene 1869 original – possibly for economic more than artistic reasons – and this two-hour-plus, interval-free whizz through seven years of Russian history is the most faithful to the first score I've heard. It's also a first for the Royal Opera, which has preferred the much longer, so-called 'supersaturated' combination of two versions in its long-running Tarkovsky production preceding Jones's. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It says a lot that by the time Little Mix reach the final song of their encore, the recent mega-hit “Black Magic”, clad in silver sci-fi space bikinis and Barbarella-esque space-boots, it’s almost anti-climactic.Blonde Geordie member Perrie Edwards suggests to the capacity crowd – mostly girls aged between seven and 14 accompanied by their mums – that this is the song they’ve been waiting for all night. Perhaps it had been at the start of the evening but by the time the band reach it, an hour-and-a-half later, their mind-boggling show has rendered its ace-in-the-hole status redundant. For Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Through the snowy wastes we crunched. The winter scenery was overwhelmingly beautiful and almost devoid of any human habitation: gorgeous mountains in the distance, the black waters of the fjords gleaming, the winter sun shining through the pale blue sky. And lo, here was Andrew Graham-Dixon, in woollen hat and furred windbreaker, to introduce us to centuries of Norwegian art.The first episode of this three-part history focused exclusively on Norway, and was subtitled "The Dark Night of the Soul". What was exceedingly odd about the programme was its melodramatic pessimism, the narration Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You may never have heard of Florence Foster Jenkins, although she has definitely earned a certain renown among music-lovers. For all the wrong reasons: the American soprano, who performed at private recitals in the early decades of the last century, before a climactic Carnegie Hall appearance a month before her death in 1944, was famous for the sheer awfulness of her voice.More a phenomenon than an artist, she was certainly a paradox: her dedication to classical music was all-consuming, as total as her inability to perceive that she had none of the technical accomplishment required to perform Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Halfway through its 10-week run, The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story appears to be running in real time as it slowly, painstakingly tells the story of how one of the US's biggest sports stars was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. But moving at what is – by modern television drama standards, at least – a glacial pace allows the creators to burrow deep into the American psyche and, more pertinently, examine the deep-rooted racism lurking in parts of US society.Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have set out their stall Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
How can an orchestra perform the music of the future? This was the question posed by Francois-Xavier Roth, congenial maestro and charming educator, as the standard concerto for platform arrangers played out behind him on the floor of LSO St Luke’s. Roth had just offered one confident answer to the question, with the first performance of Dr Glaser’s Experiment by Darren Bloom.Californian-born in 1982 but long resident in the UK, Bloom made use of both the performing space and the virtuosity of the LSO. Radiating out from a core of bass and percussion were pairs of solo and duo winds and Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
A Nordic noir that began in a blazing fish factory was bound to have lots of red herrings. Trapped, however, did not cheat and eventually revealed not only who set the fire but who was the father of Maggi, the ginger cutie waiting ever so patiently for his gift of a red fire engine. Of course, having learned what we’d learned, he no longer wanted it when Andri (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), our cop hero, turned up on his doorstep with the toy in his hand. Playtime was over.Maggi, his home squeezed between mountain and sea, would never be able to escape the knowledge that his father was a Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
A double dose of Einaudi may not be the best programming idea. A world premiere in the first half and then a UK premiere in the second part of the concert was, perhaps, overegging the musical recipe. But add to that some Respighi and some Bernstein, with conductor Damian Iorio in charge, and things turned out not so bad after all.Ludovico Einaudi’s Domino for piano and orchestra was another commission by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic to mark their 175th anniversary. It is a three-movement piece: a slow, lugubrious introduction which led – and who would know? – into an andante (subtitled, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The variables which help records attain cult status are usually permutations of obscurity, patronage, rarity and perceived or received notions of greatness. This fluid formula can make an album the acme of grooviness, even if barely anyone cared or had even heard of it when it was originally issued. Witness the Lewis album, L’Amour.This sanctioning process will never cease. There will always be something ripe for resurrection. The price of original pressings is a fair guide to interest and therefore a possible indicator of new audiences for records which had fallen between the cracks. Of Read more ...