Reviews
Veronica Lee
It’s an interesting concept that Adam Hills has come up with for his latest show, Mess Around. The ever-smiling and hugely likeable Australian - a longtime sellout hit at the Edinburgh Fringe but who has yet to make a broader breakthrough like his peers - is a past master of audience interaction, so why not ditch the material and make that the show?“Less a show and more of a chat,” he calls it, and I’m sure that when this approach works, on those nights when he mines a seam of comedy gold among his fans, that it can be huge fun. But on the first night of his 10-show run at Soho and despite Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The ballet world knows uniquely well how to stage gracious gestures to one of its own - dance history is close-knit and last night the Royal Ballet’s first mixed bill of the season turned into a surprising celebration of the Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso in her 90th year. Even more of a stunner to see Alonso herself sitting in the Royal Box, and coming on stage at the end to a standing ovation, tiny, chalk-white, red-lipped, with black glasses over her blind eyes, giving a remarkably deep curtsey for someone of 89.Actually, for a nonagenarian to take such a long flight from Cuba just to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Action-movie season ain't over quite yet, folks. Sure. OK. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow isn't exactly your conventional salute to Armageddon. No guns, no baddies, no hot babes, no long-haired hunks. The pace is slow. The dialogue's pretty non-existent - and mostly European. The setting is pastoral. The soundtrack is Ligeti. It is, in fact, mostly pure, unadulterated arthouse. But still Sophie Fiennes's documentary portrait of artist Anselm Kiefer, I would contend, could also be seen as one of the finest action movies ever made. Certainly, it's got to be the only one to feature a leading Read more ...
fisun.guner
Camera-less photography isn’t, as some might think, a 20th-century invention, discovered by experimental Modernists such as Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. Thomas Wedgwood, before the invention of the camera and at the very beginning of the 19th century, made paintings on glass and placed these in contact with pieces of paper and leather which had been rendered light sensitive with chemical treatments. Where the painted areas blocked the light, the image left its trace. Unfortunately, since Wedgwood lacked knowledge of how to fix the images, the results vanished almost as soon as they appeared.From Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"The Legend of Axl Rose" sounds like the title for a long and fanciful western movie, about a bandit who defies the law and even time itself. In person, wayward vocalist Rose does indeed resemble some kind of picaresque outlaw who rules his own eccentric kingdom, and he lent much-needed gaiety to this sprawling performance by constantly ringing the changes on a huge wardrobe of hats, jackets and multi-coloured T-shirts.He's doing his best to defy time too, quite successfully in the case of 2008's Chinese Democracy album, which took 17 years to reach fruition. But lax time-keeping has been Read more ...
David Nice
It's now 21 years since I first heard the then-untrumpeted protégés of El Sistema, the Venezuelan phenomenon which has launched a thousand youth-and-music projects worldwide. On that occasion the Royal Festival Hall was less than a quarter full, but we happy few all stood instantaneously for a work I'd never heard before (Estévez's Cantata Criolla, due for a comeback now). Last night it was a packed auditorium of all ages and sizes which gave a standing ovation to a symphony by Chávez - and that was just the end of the first half.It's now 21 years since I first heard the then-untrumpeted Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
They keep on coming, these screen-to-stage musical adaptations, noisy, bombastic, as unsubtle as juggernauts. The best of them offer up their uncomplicated entertainment with some pizazz; but Flashdance is a particularly vacuous example of the genre. You probably had to be female, and teetering on the edge of your teens, to enjoy Adrian Lyne’s critically derided film back in 1983 (I freely admit that I was, and I did): Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas’s screenplay is both shapeless and pointless. This new version, written by Hedley and Robert Cary and directed by Nikolai Foster, does nothing to Read more ...
josh.spero
Contemporary art can, unsurprisingly, become dated pretty quickly – the clue is in the name. Another of Damien Hirst’s mirrored cabinets of pills or of Gavin Turk’s piss-takes of Andy Warhol at the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park is hardly the sort of sight which will enthuse hardened art-gallery goers.But then that’s not the point of art fairs – the major ones like Frieze, Basel and Miami, anyway: they codify established trends, reinforce hierarchies. Even the layout of the galleries shows you this, with heavyweights like Gagosian and Gladstone hogging prime positions, with everyone Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The flurry of fanfares at the start of Magnus Lindberg’s Al largo (UK premiere) sounded almost Waltonian. Or maybe that was because the prospect of Osmo Vänskä in Walton’s First Symphony was such an enticing one that premonitions of its highly distinctive sound-world were already being suggested in the somewhat predictable pyrotechnics of the Lindberg. Lindberg is a great showman and an accomplished technician, but against Walton’s startling originality (circa 1935) he sounded, well, old hat - like a man rapidly losing his edge.Al largo (meaning offshore) is, not surprisingly, oceanic in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Christmas has come early to the Royal Opera House this year. Without a single shout of “He’s behind you!” or even an implausibly-uddered dancing cow, pantomime season is well and truly underway in the form of The Duenna – a corset-straining, britches-splitting, liquor-quaffing delight of a comedy. All of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s familiar wit and whimsy are here, and if they frequently need to pause and sprawl themselves out upon a comfortable melody, then so much the better. What a pity then that the music-making itself is often so uncertain.English Touring Opera has a fine track record Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The annual Dance Umbrella festival is mostly for the dance industry to talk to itself, I’ve come to feel, with a timetable so closely packed that only Londoners, and specifically those in the tight roaring circle of the know, will get to sample much of it. Then you get two such stand-out evenings as Akram Khan’s and Jonathan Burrows’ in town within a week of each other, two of the major talents in the world, who come running at the idea of theatre from opposite ends - the one spectacular and melodramatic, the other offbeat, mischievous stand-up dance-comedy.Given that there is a large border Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nowadays it’s not so easy to find a doc you can trust. Since talent shows started supplying back stories as part of an all-in-one narrative package, it’s as if everyone has learnt how to behave when there’s a camera crew around. Meanwhile, in the cutting room film-makers can be quite as manipulative as colleagues who nakedly trade in fiction. But there are some things you can’t fake. A young male troupe of cheerleaders from rough working-class south Leeds? That’s one of them.
This was a delightful film which began where it ended, with groups of pretty little girls in gingham or glittery Read more ...