Reviews
Bernard Hughes
Yesterday I travelled through a sweltering London in shorts and sandals to go and hear Schubert’s Winterreise, about a bleak journey through a frozen landscape. It was quite the disjuncture, and a strange piece of seasonal programming. But I was glad to hear veteran baritone Thomas Hampson in fine voice in the Schubert, accompanied by Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova, even if the second half of Kurt Weill and Astor Piazzolla was less fulfilling. Singers eschewing the traditional pianist for the more unusual (in the classical concert hall) sounds of the accordion is all the rage at Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a small Appalachian village, where people say “Y’all” and prospectors are still searching for silver in the mountains, Barbara Allen wants more than the humdrum life of a Trad wife (as I suppose you would call it these days). Already a bit of a rebel, she has a suitor, the dim, fighty Marvin, but there’s something just there, she knows, if only she could see it.She’s right, of course, else we wouldn’t have a show, and that something is Witch Boy John, part of a coven of sex-mad spirits whose hedonistic lifestyle has become dulled by its accompanying alienation. He wants to feel joy and Read more ...
David Nice
A libertine who deserves punishment makes a good/bad start when a male director decides he really has tried to rape Donna Anna, and doesn't just enjoy post-coital badinage with her. Tom Creed thankfully begs to differ from, say, Kasper Holten – hard to believe that Don Giovanni is due for revival in the coming Royal Opera season – or Ole Anders Tandberg at the Royal Swedish Opera (toilets à la Bieito, whose ENO Giovanni was a horrible mess - there's only one, and only briefly, on the Lismore stage). The era of "she wanted it really" is over, and Creed's good folk are vocally the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just a flimsy music stand on the RSC’s biggest stage greets us. Sir Ken, no longstaff in hand as we might have expected, dons his coat, perhaps left over from Abanazar’s costuming in an upscale pantomime, and raises his weedy, reedy baton. Instantly, all hell breaks loose on Bob Crowley’s beautiful sparse, now tilting set, supplemented by Akhila Krishnan’s Donner and Blitzen videos. The game’s afoot all right.The clue is in the title of course. Prospero, like a wizardy Leonard Bernstein, conjuring a storm to shipwreck his usurper brother, Antonio, Duke of Milan and shipwreck, amongst others, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“La bohème, Tosca, Butterfly: you just know where you are with them, don’t you?” If the bar-chat at the opening night of the Opera Holland Park 30th anniversary season was anything to go by then La fanciulla del West still has its work cut out to make it onto the podium of Puccini all-stars. But the composer’s Western not-quite-tragedy (three cheers for a heroine still live and very much kicking by the final curtain) has a delicious score flecked rich with melodic gold, and just enough celluloid silliness to keep things entertaining.Anyone who still remembers Opera Holland Park’s most Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nottingham is broiling. With sun heat. And with humanity. The pubs overspill beyond the pavement, into the road, as hordes of Nottingham Forest fans prepare for the final game of the season, sinking gallons of carbonated amber liquid. Unrelated, in Old Market Square a sizeable gaggle of the ill-informed and ham-faced, waving England flags, face off against a counter-demonstration, divided by ranks of fluorescent police. And every available venue is hosting Dot To Dot, a festival showcasing fresh musical talent.Begun in 2005, Dot To Dot is a multi-venue affair, like Camden Crawl or The Great Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Screenwriter Neil Forsyth earned kudos a-plenty with his two BBC One series of The Gold, a dramatisation of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery and its aftermath. Now he’s stepped aboard the good ship Netflix for this story of heroin-pushing gangs in London and Liverpool, set in the dying days of the Thatcher government at the turn of the Nineties.Again the story is rooted in fact, and explores how a group of fairly lowly customs officers were recruited to infiltrate and destroy a multi-million pound heroin racket that was wreaking havoc with both poor kids in Northern housing estates as Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Maybe because we are aware now of too many cases of a paranoid schizophrenic suddenly unleashing violence on an innocent stranger, the teenager under treatment in Peter Schaffer’s 1973 play, who has blinded six horses, is no longer a character we feel that conflicted about.Unlike Martin Dysart (Toby Stephens), the psychiatrist whose encounter with just such a lad upends his thinking about almost everything, especially his own motives for pursuing his career. While Alan (Noah Valentine) struggles with his desire for someone to inspire his life and settles on the divine presence he senses in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Wanda Sykes is a comic, actress and writer who has written for Chris Rock and appeared in Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Good Fight and, more latterly, Netflix series The Upshaws. But standup fans know her for her on-the-money political humour, and in this Netflix special she doesn’t disappoint.Sykes opens Legacy by reminiscing about her time at Hampton University in Virginia. Things have improved since she studied there, she says, pointing to the spacious auditorium she is performing in, new sports facilities, more cafeterias. In her day, the only dining option was, she says drily, “gravy, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Really Into Somethin' - Brit Girl Sounds and Styles 1962-1970 is an explicitly titled 89-track, three-CD clamshell box set. Take one of its terrific tracks at random: Adrienne Poster’s “The Way You do the Things You do.” A February 1965 B-side, it’s a cover version of the Temptations’ US hit. Recognisably a British production it, at this remove, sounds like a UK chart certainty. There had, though, already been a British adaptation issued a month earlier by Elkie Brooks, hence the B-side status for Poster’s version. Neither single was a best seller.
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Boyd Tonkin
Literally the first masterpiece of the 20th century (premiered on 14 January 1900), Tosca has had to wait until the second quarter of the 21st to arrive on the Glyndebourne stage. That delay tells you much about Glyndebourne, and about the lingering odour of distaste and even revulsion that for a long time hung in polite operatic circles around Puccini’s “shabby little shocker”.This political melodrama makes its gorgeous tunes shine against a gruesome backdrop of power, pain and fear. Director Ted Huffman (on his Glyndebourne debut) must contend both with audience expectations about a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Former Royal Ballet principal Federico Bonelli has brought his Northern Ballet company south in the latest of its trademark narrative ballets. His dancers are a huge credit to him, but I wish they were appearing in a more challenging piece.The television adaptation of Anne Lister’s story put her firmly on the map as an early sighting of an English lesbian. Her sexual preferences, unlike male homosexuality, weren’t technically illegal but were still shocking to the politer parts of Victorian society, Those who saw the two TV series may find this stage version a tad tame, though at least they Read more ...