Reviews
Matt Wolf
As further proof that Shakespeare plays come these days not as single spies but in battalions, the London leg of the all-male Propeller ensemble's lengthy tour has pitched up in the capital in time to deliver their Richard III within days of Kevin Spacey's debut in that very role at the Old Vic. Think of it as the battle for supremacy over the Bard's second-longest play or not, one thing seems clear: you're unlikely to find as abundantly bloody and brutal an account of this particular Shakespearean horror show for some while to come. Is director Edward Hall bidding to become the British Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Directors of Madama Butterfly are spoilt for choice when it comes to visual imagery. At their disposal are the vast aesthetic resources of at least one, or, if they're clever, two great cultural superpowers. Thus, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier's Ikea-raid from 2003 (quite unbelievably returning to the Royal Opera House last night for a fourth time) isn't so much disappointing as criminally negligent. As the dozen or so identikit Japanese blinds (I'll give them £2.50 for the lot) lower their white screens to the sound of their own electronic humming chorus on Pinkerton's arrival in Nagasaki Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce is best remembered for Michael Curtiz's entertainingly lurid 1945 movie version, starring Joan Crawford. Featuring William Faulkner among its screenwriters, it played fast and loose with Cain's book, but bashed it into crowd-pleasing shape successfully enough to win Crawford an Oscar.Cue Todd Haynes's five-part miniseries for HBO (brought to us, or to some of us, by Sky Atlantic) and the equation is reversed. Haynes has adhered to the original book with exaggerated reverence, so much so that the dialogue sometimes feels more like sequential monologues Read more ...
David Nice
If Eric Coates’s Knightsbridge March is good enough for Gergiev, who conducted it as a saving-grace encore of a very messy World Orchestra for Peace Prom in 2005 (17 orchestral leaders in the first violins, not a happy gambit), then it’s certainly worth the time of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and one of its biggest sound-shapers. Bright spark John Wilson unhesitatingly claims Coates as his favourite light-music composer. But this concert served up more than just bubbles in the champagne of the Southbank’s Festival of Britain 60th anniversary celebrations; there was some decent semi-serious Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Nico Muhly had one humble aim for his first opera. He wanted to create an episode of Prime Suspect, he told me last week. "A grand opera that functions as a good night's entertainment." There's no doubt he's achieved that. Two Boys, receiving its world premiere last night at the English National Opera, is as gripping an operatic thriller as any ever penned. But is there more to the work than that? The opera tackles the great themes of our age: the internet, youth corruptibility, sexual coming of age. And while Muhly's music deals with these with a humanity and wisdom that opens many more Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It must be the beautiful British weather that has attracted a bunch of American comics to UK shores recently. Just before Las Vegas legend Rita Rudner starts a short season at the Leicester Square Theatre in London and hot on the heels of his Curb Your Enthusiasm sometime colleague Jerry Seinfeld (who recently did one night at the O2 in Greenwich and of whom more later) comes Jeff Garlin. He plays “fat fuck” Jeff, Larry David’s agent in the HBO sitcom, which, I’m delighted to report, returns in a new season on the BBC later this summer.Garlin makes a point of his girth from the off, telling Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Of all the curdled classics made during the neo-noir wave of the Seventies and early Eighties - including Klute, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Conversation, Night Moves, Farewell My Lovely, Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and The Postman Always Rings Twice - Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is the most neglected. That’s partially a result of United Artists’ attempt, according to the Czech émigré Passer, to “murder” the independently produced movie by intentionally botching the initial US release (as Cutter and Bone, the title of Newton Thornburg’s source novel) in March 1981, though Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we’ve a grandiose choral work inspired by a composer’s love for the beautiful game, along with two noisily enjoyable attempts to portray physical movement in musical terms. A frighteningly young Russian soprano’s debut recital is released - a selection of flamboyant Rossini arias accompanied by a famous period instrument specialist. And there's the first recording of a new opera based on a terribly, terribly English story, composed by an American musician fondly regarded in the UK.Kamran Ince: Hot, Red, Cold, Vibrant, Requiem Without Words, Before Infrared, Symphony No 5, ‘ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Americans have form when it comes to creating superior remakes of British TV shows. Life on Mars with Michael Imperioli? You gotta love it. The Office without Ricky Gervais? We are eternally in their debt.
Now they've taken Paul Abbott's Shameless in for a full engine re-bore and respray, with Abbott himself on board as writer and executive producer. The formaggio grandissimo of the Stateside version, though, is John Wells, of ER and The West Wing fame, and it's the rather imperial-looking John Wells Productions logo that you see at the conclusion of each programme.
It's bound to take a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There be dragons aplenty, angels, demons and ghastly creatures both fleshy and feathered in the Globe Theatre’s inaugural production of Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe’s take on the familiar Faust legend, bold in its religious content, was a controversial hit of its day, but the play’s almost medieval apposition of high thinking and knockabout farce by no means guarantees it success in the contemporary theatre. If Matthew Dunster and his team of actors fail with any of their audience it won’t be for want of trying. Throwing themselves at the material with characteristic Globe energy, Read more ...
fisun.guner
As one of the stars of the Moulin Rouge, she was variously known by the nicknames "La Mélinite", "Jane la Folle", and "L’Etrange". The first was after a brand of explosive, the other two attesting to a little craziness. Jane Avril’s eccentric dance movements evoked the involuntary spasms of female hysteria patients. But while photographs exaggerate her childlike demeanour (she wears her hair in ringlets and poses in a range of shepherdess bonnets, a look popular in 19th-century music hall), as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s muse, she was transformed into a somewhat haunted figure far older than Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill, better known as Kings of Leon, have come a long, long way from their humble Tennessee roots in the last 12 years. In London last night playing to a 65,000-strong crowd in the same week that a documentary charting their rise hits cinemas, the contrast between the life they were born into and the one they have carved out couldn’t be more marked.Opening with the Aha Shake Heartbreak hit "Four Kicks", people screamed and danced about to the roaring of electric guitars and the growling twang of Caleb’s voice. But Read more ...