Reviews
Adam Sweeting
American critics have been fanfaring Modern Family as something of a sitcom revolution for its wit, intelligence and the cast's all-round expertise. It might take longer to grow a British fanbase, because you need a few spins around the circuit before its contours start to feel familiar, but then suddenly the lights go on and revelation ensues.
Initially, it looks like it should be called Modern Families. There's grouchy senior citizen Jay (Ed O'Neill) and his young Colombian wife Gloria (the scorchio Sofia Vergara), gay couple Mitchell and Cameron, and "conventional" parents-with-kids Phil Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It was a weird experience to get home from last night’s performance by Shobana Jeyasingh’s dance company to find Nick Griffin on TV defending his view of “indigenous” Britons. There’s a vigorous stratum of British contemporary dance that could come only from today’s fecund mixing of London and the East, and it’s the faultline where the two layers don’t fuse that makes much of this work tougher and more intriguing in intention than the more “indigenous”, in Griffinese.Jeyasingh, with her Indian childhood and classical Bharata Natyam dance training, her 30 years living in London, and a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anyone looking for a novel way into their PhD on how the British like to be entertained would do well to sit in the audience of the live version of Grumpy Old Women, a successful spin-off from the BBC television series where celebby femmes d’un certain age sit and moan about whatever takes their fancy. Students of British social mores will learn that what Brits love more than anything is a good old moan - and will even pay to hear someone else do it for them.One assumes that the gripes expressed on the TV version are the contributors’ own, but on stage it’s a scripted piece by Judith Holder Read more ...
howard.male
The first thing to say about Drawing Attention is that its title decidedly undersells the scope of this compelling and unpredictable exhibition, which spans five centuries and includes 100 works from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s collection. Most of us might define a drawing as some kind of monochromatic sketch, either produced by the artist as preparatory work for a finished painting, or to capture some ephemeral moment. The drawing represents artists, paradoxically, at their most casual and yet most focused, transcribing what is seen with intense concentration, yet often rendering it with Read more ...
sheila.johnston
There has been robust debate on the internet over whether Colin could, in fact, have been made for such a small sum - it makes the forthcoming chiller Paranormal Activity, made for $10,000 and now a huge box-office hit in the US thanks to a vigorous viral marketing campaign (it opens in the UK on 27 November), look like a megabudget blockbuster.Clearly it wouldn't be possible to make even such a modest film as Colin for £45 without calling in an awful lot of favours. (The first-time director, Marc Price, told me his cast of dozens had to bring their own packed lunches, while his make-up Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Britain’s favourite ballet choreographer Chris Wheeldon rode into his homeland last night, bringing with his Anglo-American company Morphoses work by himself and by Britain’s second favourite ballet choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. Two favourites should be enough to guarantee the opening programme, but there are two drawbacks: the pieces filling the middle of the programme, and the limp video in which it’s all wrapped. And the whole represents a split in taste between US and British ballet expectations from which I am beginning to fear Morphoses - that shining optimistic light of new ballet a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Al Murray started doing his Pub Landlord character in the mid-1990s, many (including me) thought it was an invention of comic genius. The sad, deluded Essex Man, railing against the modern world and cuckolded by a Frenchman, was a ridiculous xenophobe and someone for whom a teary-eyed version of dear old Blighty existed in a kind of mental sepia. It was a masterclass in subtlety, suggestion and irony.The comedy was clever, layered and deep in pathos, but such knowing material was never going to succeed when Sky TV came calling and the character was given his own sitcom. The delicious Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In space, no-one can hear you snore. The opening two-parter of Defying Gravity introduced us, in a sluggish and tortuous manner, to the six-year mission of the spacecraft Antares, which contains eight astronauts and will visit seven planets, starting with Venus. Everything was meant to be stirring and momentous as mankind took up the baton previously lifted by the likes of Vasco da Gama and Neil Armstrong, to pursue the quest for knowledge and new frontiers. More prosaically, the trade journals tell us that Antares may be brought down by networks pulling the financial plug before it can be Read more ...
robert.sandall
The success of Spandau Ballet's ecstatically received reunion lies in no small part in its impeccable timing. The band could hardly have chosen a better moment to re-form and revisit their well stocked catalogue of 1980s hits. Not only are their original fans now stuck firmly into middle age and feeling the usual nostalgia for the soundtrack of their youth, but a younger generation of listeners has at last decided that Eighties pop is cool.LaRoux, Florence and the Machine and Friendly Fires are just three of today's hot acts who derive their musical influences and fashion cues from Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
Much like Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G, Op 79, with which he started the programme, I’ll get straight to the point. Till Fellner is a very good pianist. To demonstrate this, I’d like to jump to the last sonata of five we heard in this all-Beethoven programme last night: the Piano Sonata in E flat, Op 7. When you look at this music on the page, you could easily see this piece becoming a bumptious triplet-fest of mind-numbing proportions. When it is in the capable and stylish hands of someone like Fellner, it turns into an artful musical argument, with unexpected turns at every corner and Read more ...
howard.male
Portuguese singer-songwriter Sara Tavares trades in understatement. She strokes rather than strums guitar chords, her two percussionists are more likely to brush a drum than whack it hard, and her soft close-to-the-mike voice specialises in gentle yearning rather than soul-girl histrionics. So the intimate space of the Jazz Café seems much better suited to her than, say, the Barbican where she had the unenviable task earlier this year of being a viable support act to the larger-than-life Malian diva, Oumou Sangare. As it turned out, Sara did a perfectly good job of warming up Oumou’s crowd, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a big ask for any performer to take on a role that was written specially for another actor, but Diana Vickers’ supporters from her appearances in last year’s X Factor on ITV will be pleased to learn that she acquits herself very well indeed. She is Little Voice in Terry Johnson’s pleasing revival of Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, which began life in the National’s Cottesloe Theatre in 1992 with Jane Horrocks in the title role.Horrocks' uncanny ability to impersonate several divas, from Shirley Bassey and Gracie Fields to Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, formed the Read more ...