Reviews
Veronica Lee
Olga Koch comes bounding on to the stage and tells us she needs a time machine to tell her story, to prevent someone being born – at which point a reference to a certain happening in Nazareth 2026 years ago flashes up on the onstage screens. It’s the first of several neat gags – many of them throwaway – in which she provides the set-up, and the payoff follows on the screens.It’s a catchy addition to what is essentially a good old-fashioned piece of storytelling that’s fast-paced and whipsmart. In Fat Tom Cruise (directed by Jet Vevers) Koch dances along a timeline that skips between present Read more ...
David Kettle
Water Colour ★★★★Milly Sweeney’s powerful two-hander comes to one of the Fringe’s highest-profile venues bearing prestigious awards for new writing, and it’s not hard to see why it’s won them. Water Colour is a taut, focused, elegantly constructed creation that rather miraculously manages to be both poetic and bracingly vernacular, bristling with the distinctive rhythms of Glaswegian speech but unafraid to mull over matters of life and death, and the apparently arbitrary nature of both, with compassion and insight.Haunted by school traumas, Esme is struggling to put paintbrush to canvas Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the sound quality is slightly boxy, the opening track on CBGB’s 1985 is a treat. “Gardens” is on a line between first-album Rain Parade and Unhalfbricking-era Fairport Convention, it’s hard to tell from this live album whether Rochester, New York’s Absolute Grey – grey, not gray – caught the attention of their subdued-seeming Manhattan audience four decades ago while playing NYC’s prime roots-level venue. Now, though, it’s clear “Gardens” is top-drawer folk rock-inclined psychedelia which demands instant attention.When a studio version of “Gardens” – recorded in July 1985 – was Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s three typical cat-lives since Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn staged TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as a musical. The piece can’t quite shake the feel of being a cleverly fashioned showcase for individual performers whose component parts are not totally stitched together. But 45 years on, it can still surprise.Drew McOnie, in charge at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, is a director who can be relied upon to freshen up familiar material, as he did in his small-forces update of Nutcracker at the SBC. This isn’t a radically rethought CATS, as that production was, but its Read more ...
India Lewis
Director Charlie McDowell's The Summer Book is a beautiful, somewhat wistful film that follows the residents of a tiny Finnish island (daughter, father, grandmother) over a summer. The father (Anders Danielsen Lie, of The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value) is mourning the death of his wife, whilst his mother (Glenn Close) provides brisk, no-nonsense comfort, and his daughter, Sophia (Emily Matthews), struggles to come to terms with her new life and the loss it involves.The film is adapted from Tove Jansson’s book of the same name and shares much of its episodic nature, as well Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Poor Oberon! An opera scorned so long as weird and silly,A mash-up of outlandish tales all chucked in willy-nilly.Now brave Sir Mark (the Elder one) rides out to save its name. On Albert Hall’s broad field, will he win immortal fame And glorify the final work of Carl Maria Von Weber – Or leave the Prommers fretting over so much wasted labour?OK, I’ll stop there. Timothy Knapman’s new narration for Oberon replaced the original dialogue by James Robinson Planché – universally dismissed as a calamitous botch – with corny, witty jingling heptameters that irresistibly Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Spanning a hundred years, the Dulwich Picture Gallery's show of American photography is a twofold delight. Most of the great names are included, so practically every picture is a masterpiece of the medium and together they flesh out a story of cities in a constant state of flux and change. This is not an exhibition about buildings and cityscapes, though, so much as the people who inhabit them. And the most striking aspect of this look at city life is the squalor and grinding poverty in which so many Americans have lived for much of that time.The show starts with Alfred Stieglitz who, intent Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s an incendiary one-woman monologue to be had from Christine Lahti’s 2018 book about the misogyny of her upbringing, but The Smile of Her feels rather like an early draft of it. Lahti performs it with great candour and pops of dry humour, but you feel it could be even more arresting.Her book of essays, True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness: A Feminist Coming of Age, looks at different aspects of her life from early days to middle age (she is now, unbelievably, a sprightly 76). Somehow she has condensed this swathe of experiences into a 90-minute monologue, but inevitably this means Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Last night’s Prom saw two beloved favourites – Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony – prefaced by a fairly unknown quantity. This was Bernd Alois Zimmerman’s rediscovered Fairy-Tale Suite, written for radio by the German composer in 1950 but never performed until 2001. Unmistakably haunted by war-time nightmares, it takes us spine-tinglingly deep into some truly menacing woods. Sadly, the magically gifted Alina Ibragimova – soloist in the Mendelssohn – had to fight her way through thickets of her own as Elena Schwarz allowed a robust and well-muscled BBC Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Temple Songs opens with “Arc Still Bends”. The song begins with filigreed acoustic guitar and Laura Veirs singing “the arc still bends towards justice, right?” “So why I am still holding this fucking sign,” she continues. It’s not hard to get where this is coming from. Atmospherically, what’s conjured suggests the glacial shimmer of Linda Perhacs. As the album beds in, a Joni Mitchell-evoking jazziness is apparent. A recurrent cross talk between Veirs’ lead voice and her dubbed-in backing vocals is another Perhacs-like quality. Lyrics are questioning, asking to be accepted at face value Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This is Nicola Benedetti’s fourth opening concert while she has been in charge of the Edinburgh International Festival, and I suspect it might be the one she’s most proud of. That’s not (only) because it featured All Rise, the jazz symphony written by the superstar jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (who is also Benedetti’s husband), but because it seemed to unite all the things Benedetti has previously striven for in her opening concerts. Like the rest of them, this pushed the envelope beyond the standard western classical canon, combined diverse musical forces, and focused on themes of building Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What would ol’ Shakey think of such liberties? Two plays that may or may not be a single narrative, which may or may not have a missing middle section, stitched together with a bit of text added here and a bit there. Then staged outside a toffs' school on Richmond Hill, far from the spit and sawdust of Southwark in every sense.I'd conjecture - and maybe it’s wishful thinking, but The Bard certainly wasn’t precious with his work - that he’d have two questions above all others. Was the box office decent? Did the laughs land? Both would be answered to the actor-manager’s satisfaction.No Read more ...