Reviews
bruce.dessau
"Noel. Noel." Damon Albarn had to shout twice before Noel Gallagher joined him onstage to strum his guitar during Blur's neo-bluesy "Tender". Maybe Albarn's former Britpop rival wanted their historic musical union to take just a little bit longer. Maybe he wanted Albarn to wait just to assert himself. Or maybe after all these years of standing between very loud bands and very loud audiences he is a little deaf. But it happened. At around 8.30pm on Saturday March 23 the Britpop War was officially over. Churchill and Stalin at Yalta was maybe a more significant alliance, but only just.Albarn Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stephen Stills: Carry OnSprawling across these four discs is the curious saga of the megastar who fell to earth. From early 1967, when Stephen Stills's song "For What It's Worth" became a Top 10 hit for LA folk-rockers Buffalo Springfield, to 1973's Down the Road, the second and final album with his band Manassas, Stills was leading the charge at the white-hot edge of the rock revolution. But after that his stock plummeted, his albums falling lower and lower in the charts as his imperious aura dwindled bewilderingly. He last appeared on Billboard's Top 200 when his 1984 disc Right Read more ...
peter.quinn
Suddenly, it's raining Duke Ellington homages. Stateside, there's Terri Lyne Carrington's Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, a brilliant reimagining of Ellington's classic 1963 trio recording with Charles Mingus and Max Roach that recently hit the top spot on the JazzWeek radio chart. Here in the UK, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra's latest release In the Spirit of Duke – recorded on tour during October 2012 – features an all-Duke programme which captures the Ellington Orchestra sound down to the tiniest detail. This evening at the QEH, the Nu Civilisation Orchestra joins the Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
A toast to London’s Handel Festival, now celebrating its 36th year, and to Ian Page’s adventurous Classical Opera Company, for pulling Telemann out of the drawer and placing him in the forefront of this year’s celebrations at St. George’s, Hanover Square. There used to be a school of thought, part-informed and partly way off-beam, that Telemann, and others of Bach’s contemporaries, were boring: Baroque musical wallpaper, worthy but shorn of the structural daring, instrumental colouring and spiritual intensity of JS Bach’s most affecting scores. That’s not a view Bach took: he Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The best horror stories take place in mundane surroundings. The envelope of the ordinary gives a context of credibility to the practically incredible. In Janice Okoh’s new play, which won the 2011 Bruntwood prize at the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester, and was seen there earlier this year, everyday life at first seems, well, entirely everyday, but soon things get worse. Much worse. In fact, almost unbelievably bad. Horror indeed.But first the ordinary: we are in Lewisham, south-east London, and the set is a groundfloor council flat. It’s tidy, and home to three siblings: 16-year-old Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s one of the most anticipated theatrical openings of the year, with tickets allegedly changing hands for astronomical sums and some pundits rushing to issue dire warnings of the depths of its lewdness and its shattering shock factor well before its official first night. So can this musical by Robert Lopez and the incorrigible South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker possibly live up the hype? The answer – rather like the existence (or not) of some supreme guiding deity – depends on your point of view. Is it fun (or, as those clean-cut Mormon boys with their ultra-white shirts, Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
When Craig Zobel’s true-life thriller Compliance played at Sundance, it was met equally with critical praise and audience outrage. There were walk-outs, complaints, shouting matches. At the London Film Festival last year, reaction was similarly polarized – one indignant viewer attempted to lead a mass walkout, rising from his seat during a particularly troubling scene with the rallying call of “Okay everybody, I think it’s time to go now!”It’s not impossible to understand the response – to say that Compliance is a tough watch is to vastly understate the skin-crawling, clammy-handed Read more ...
Helen K Parker
As the sun sets on the age of the Xbox 360, its swansong is an entertaining game that shows promising potential, but doesn’t really knock your socks off. A prequel to the previous Gears of War games, Judgement opens in the days immediately following the "Emergence Day" on the planet Sera, when the original inhabitants of the planet decided to crawl out of the woodwork and wreak havoc on mankind.Being dragged in front of a court marshal and charged with treason against the COG is one Lieutenant Damon Baird (pictured below right) and his Kilo squad. It’s clear they’ve done something seriously Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How can you not love a show that opens with Robert Plant singing "Satan, your kingdom must come down" on the soundtrack? The song is aptly chosen, since Boss is the story of Chicago mayor Tom Kane, a bully, a tyrant and a master of the black arts of political fixing and gloves-off deal-making. But his days are numbered.The introductory scene of this first episode was a monologue by an unseen woman, addressed to Kane (played with thunderous assurance by Kelsey Grammer) seated in what looked like a derelict warehouse. This was an odd location for the kind of news that the voice was giving him. Read more ...
fisun.guner
What’s this? Harold and Albert turfed out of their old stamping ground of Shepherd’s Bush and turned into West Country natives? Any change to a cherished sitcom comes at the theatre director’s peril, but a change of accent? Somehow, this sounds a jarring note more dissonant than any changes to script or action, though, in fact, Emma Rice’s adaptation has remained remarkably faithful to Galton and Simpson’s original 1962 pilot, as well as to three later episodes. These four episodes form the basis of Kneehigh’s production which premiered in Cornwall last year, where the company is based. It’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a fairy tale which may send children to sleep before the good bits, then wake them up screaming at the first glimpse of loping, bestial giants. Splicing Jack the Giant-Killer (subject of a 1962 kids’ monster movie which gave me nightmares) and the more familiar Jack and the Beanstalk, it has farmboy Jack (Nicholas Hoult) spilling the magic beans, and following mildly rebellious princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) up the resultant beanstalk to a stone kingdom of giants above the clouds.Along for the ride are king’s men Elmont (Ewan McGregor, unfeasibly youthful and dashing) and Read more ...
Heather Neill
Mathematicians are a breed apart, bandying numbers about in a way that few outside their magic circle can fully understand. David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play uses this exclusiveness to investigate the complex relationship between a father and daughter.Robert, a brilliant academic whose ground-breaking research inspired a generation of devoted students before he became mentally ill, has recently died. His daughter Catherine (Mariah Gale, pictured below right with Matthew Marsh as Robert), now 25, has spent years caring for him in their dilapidated Chicago home, curtailing her own Read more ...