No one ever said putting on a show was easy, least of all the names (a lot of them famous, quite a few not) on compulsively watchable view in The Sound of Musicals. Channel 4's reality-TV probe into the world of art, commerce, and high kicks is sure to be catnip to theatre folk the world over, even if the sight of Broadway actor-turned-Chichester "star" Christopher Fitzgerald walking his tentative way across a tightrope in his role as PT Barnum soon becomes a visual metaphor for the performer's ever-precarious chosen profession. Take a tumble and it's not that simple to get back up, and even Read more ...

Jane Bussmann may not be an immediately familiar name to some, but you will know her work. The writer, who was once a celebrity journalist, has been part of the writing teams for South Park, Smack the Pony and Brass Eye, among other quality television comedies, and wrote a hilarious memoir, The Worst Date Ever, about how a reckless whim took her to war-torn Uganda, where she helped unveil the appalling crimes of rebel leader Joseph Kony.She has maintained close links with many she met on her travels and now lives much of the time in Kenya, from where she is well placed to cast a cynical eye Read more ...

Earlier this year early music ensemble Stile Antico released a really fabulous disc. The Phoenix Rising is a collage of the Tudor church-music classics that all gained their status and familiarity thanks to the work of the Carnegie Trust and their Tudor Church Music edition. The recording has – very deservedly – won or been nominated for a handful of awards, and if this were a CD review I’d be able to leave it at that. Unfortunately it’s a concert review, and last night’s performance at Cadogan Hall was a different matter.In a UK market saturated with early music singing groups – The Sixteen Read more ...

Last night’s Konitz and Wheeler concert was the sort of event at which the audience’s jaw has dropped before the music starts. Lee Konitz and Kenny Wheeler already have substantial legacies: Konitz’s cool sax style was a landmark sound, for decades the only serious alternative to Parker’s bop; his huge discography, varied in style but pretty uniform in quality, is a testament to his enduring commitment to experiment. Wheeler has always found it easier to like his writing rather than playing. His monumental ECM recordings give plenty to admire in both, though his compositions, musically so Read more ...

How much time does anyone want to spend in the company of Kim Philby? BBC Four’s Storyville allotted him 75 minutes, which isn’t much to tell the story of a third man with two paymasters and four wives. And yet this portrait somehow contrived to outstay its welcome. This is not to come over all huffy Heffer about betrayal. It’s just that hunting for the real Philby is like wandering around a maze uncertain if you’re looking for the entrance or the exit.A dense construct of false fronts and double lives, raffishly charming and impeccably English, Philby amounted in The Spy Who Went into the Read more ...

Stuttgart Ballet, one of Europe's most highly respected companies, is clearly determined to show London its best sides – all of them. Thirteen pieces in one performance is less a mixed bill than a tasting menu, and one that aims to impress: this smorgasbord of pieces were all choreographed for the company, and more than half have not been performed in the UK before.The menu proper is preceded by an amuse-bouche which sets the tone for the evening: John Cranko's short Hommage à Bolshoi (1964) is a velouté of classical loveliness (perfectly rendered by the stunning lines of Maria Eichwald) with Read more ...

Six years away from live comedy (save for a couple of outings as MC for mixed-bill shows) haven't blunted Frank Skinner's stand-up skills. He's still an accomplished gag writer and performer, and his quick-witted comic's brain is, as ever, much in evidence in Man in a Suit at Soho Theatre in London.He riffs on any number of things in a show of wide-ranging subject matter of observational comedy – everything from going grey to wearing brogues, relationships to the sexual semiotics of popcorn – and one that appears to have little by way of a narrative thread, but which however does have Read more ...

Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital is the place where both JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald died and it serves as the central setting for the most recent film to investigate the assassination of the 35th President. Former journalist Peter Landesman directs and approaches this much pored-over incident with a fresh perspective by putting the doctor who operated on the President, the man who filmed the footage of the assassination, the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald and the special agent in charge of security under the microscope.Based on Vincent Bugliosi’s book Four Days in November, shot in just twenty Read more ...

Wayne Shorter’s Quartet were introduced as “the greatest jazz band on the planet”. It’s an unexceptional thing, like the Rolling Stones being introduced as “the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world”. But unlike the Stones, who really haven’t done anything new or vital since the 1970s, Wayne Shorter and his cohorts, pianist Damielo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade, who have been with him for a decade or so, have relentlessly magicked wonderful new music out of the air. Now 80, he doesn’t seem to be running out of steam just yet.This concert was the proverbial game Read more ...

Hailed in some quarters as a wily and satirical retro-classic, Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess depends for its survival on threading its way through the eye of a tiny nostalgic needle. Bujalski's intention was to create a kind of hommage to the single-minded, possibly autistic computing pioneers of the early Eighties, often unsightly weirdos with hilarious hair and no clothes sense who nonetheless "saw this mountain and insisted on climbing it," as Bujalski puts it.After barely managing to sit through the first 10 minutes, in which creators of rival computer chess programs at a weekend Read more ...

Five minutes into this concert, at that stage a polite cello and piano duo, there was a raucous bellowing from the rear, so loud that the front stalls leapt. The delicate cello spiccato continued, despite the persistent bellowing. Gradually, the musicians adapted to the new sound, and to widespread astonishment, Senegalese singer Mola Sylla, chanting in Wolof, descended through the stalls onto the stage.  It was shamelessly theatrical, but it set the tone for a highly original and technically skilful performance, if also self-consciously provocative, sometimes to the edge of self parody Read more ...

In a fascinating interview with the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, published in The Los Angeles Times in June 1979 around the release of Mingus, Mitchell signs off with the following aperçu. “You know, pigeonholes all seem funny to me. I feel like one of those lifer-educational types that just keep going for letters after their name. I want the full hyphenate – folk-rock-country-jazz-classic...so finally, when you get all the hyphens in, maybe they'll drop them all and get down to just some American music.”Playing her very first shows in the UK as part of this year's London Jazz Festival, Read more ...