Reviews
Gary Naylor
Ain’t Too Proud? Ain’t too good either, I’m afraid. Which is a shame as there’s plenty of the raw material here that powers juggernaut jukebox musicals around the world, but this production has the feel of a cruise ship show with a much tighter band and better singers. We follow the rise of the Motown megaband, The Temptations, from the dark alleyways of Detroit to the top of the charts, supercharged by hits like “My Girl”, “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”. Their stock-in-trade comprised power ballads sung in close harmony and stage shows that sold the songs Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Invasion by a colonising power has convulsed a country, dividing families – even individuals – between the rival claims of resistance and collaboration. A captured freedom-fighter from the indigenous elite faces execution; an imperial general hopes to wed his widow and bring a kind of peace to the conquered land.Meanwhile, another local leader has thrown in his lot with the invaders – to the dismay of his rebel children. You can see why the action of Arminio, which Handel saw premiered at Covent Garden in 1737, might appeal to a director with an eye on recent history – or on today’s headlines Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a moment in the opening stretch of Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong where you think the former Hamilton star has written a piece about slavery that’s in much the same idiom as the hit musical. Music will indeed be a strong presence in this piece, but it is crafted around the songs of West Africa, lovingly supported by the playing of a djeli n'goni (a traditional Griot stringed instrument) by Sidiki Dembele. He is playing a drum when the audience enters and soon involves us in mirroring his rhythms with our clapping. This is the tenor of what follows: it’s theatre as an Read more ...
Saskia Baron
AV Rockwell well deserved the Grand Jury award at Sundance in January for her debut feature film, A Thousand and One.It’s hard to believe that this subtle portrait of a troubled young woman trying to raise a child is the work of a first time writer-director, or that Inez, its gritty protagonist, is played with no vanity by the glamorous choreographer, singer, and reality TV star Teyana Taylor.We first meet Inez in prison where she’s doing her cellmate’s hair. It’s 1994 and she’s about to be released after a year inside. Back in her old Brooklyn neighbourhood, she is determined to get her Read more ...
stephen.walsh
We hear a lot about political and economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s, winters of discontent and all the rest of it, the predictable if not predicted remote outcome of what Jacques Maritain called the “immense intellectual disarray inherited from the 19th century.”Music suffered its own version of this protracted trauma, as composers began to fall out of love with the disagreeable but seemingly inevitable impenetrability of modern music, including their own, since the turn of the century and Arnold Schoenberg. A sort of half-baked neo-romanticism was born in the Seventies, but it threw up Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“This was an act of self defence,” is the last message we hear as How To Blow Up a Pipeline approaches the end of its 104-minute span. The speaker, a revolutionary environmental activist called Xochitl, has been arrested for her involvement in the demolition of oil pipelines in Texas, but in her view her arrest and the media frenzy surrounding it is all grist to her mill of shaking the world out of its climate-crisis apathy.Based on the book of the same name by Swedish academic Andreas Malm and directed by Daniel Goldhaber, How To Blow Up a Pipeline offers various instructive pieces of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not often with Private Lives that you feel Amanda and Elyot are one step away from a visit to A&E. But such is the startling force of Michael Longhurst's Donmar Warehouse revival of arguably Noël Coward's most durable play that you are aware throughout of violence and pain as the flipside of passion at its most intense. Some will complain (and have) that the result negates the comedy coursing through this time-honored text; I would argue that the laughs are still there, tempered in this instance by an awareness of the lacerations oftentimes inflicted by love. After all Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
French-Danish soprano Elsa Dreisig’s operatic schedule is so busy and so successful, it is perhaps not surprising that she – and Texas-born pianist Jonathan Ware – treat the song recital platform as a place of freedom, where, rather than delivering the predictable or the comforting, they can test out ideas and set themselves challenges. As she has told one interviewer, it is a place where "I can push my artistic practice to its ultimate limit."In the early stages of their recital a deep dive into French fin-de-siecle aestheticism, they occasionally drew that particular kind of slightly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day is nearly here. At theartsdesk on Vinyl we have a selection of goodies which are appearing exclusively in record shops. See anything you fancy?THEARTSDESK ON VINYL’S VINYL OF RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2023Suicide A Way of Life Rareties (BMG)With Suicide’s underrated 1988 album A Way of Life heading for reissue, this Record Store Day release amps the anticipation with a four-track 12” of associated odds’n’ends. It opens with a live version of, supposedly, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”, but it is, in fact, frontman Alan Vega vamping around songs including Fats Domino’s “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There will be two theartsdesk on Vinyls this week. The first is here, an epic 11,000 words on a multitude of new releases in every genre, from reissues of classics to spanking new strangeness. There’s something for everyone. On Thursday we’ll have a special edition in honour of Record Store Day this coming Saturday, so watch out for that too. For now, though, dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHElsa Bergman Playon Crayon (B.Inspelningar)In the mid-1960s British composer and pal of Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, composed a piece called Treatise whose sheet music consisted of a series of symbolic Read more ...
David Nice
To create a sensitive and original music-drama around the subject of a school killing is a colossal achievement. Director Simon Stone, set designer Chloe Lamford and novelist Sofi Oksanen’s cutting libretto make Innocence seem like a masterpiece. I wish I were less ambivalent about Kaija Saariaho’s score.More trenchant than her previous tapestries of bewitching sounds, it's both superbly conducted by Susanna Mälkki and played with absolute assurance by the Royal Opera Orchestra. From the start, bassoons define writhing ideas of the kind we haven’t often encountered in her music before, other Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It might be nigh on six months since Scandinavian shamen (and women) Goat released their latest opus, Oh Death, but it has taken until now for them to finally bring their energetic live show back to the UK. On Sunday’s evidence, it is a wait that now feels like a small price to pay though, as Brummies young and old blew their minds and danced their socks off to intoxicating sounds that provoked a seriously ecstatic response.Before Goatman and his hoards had even hit the stage, the Mill was a packed space of human soup that contained more dry ice within its atmosphere than even the Sisters of Read more ...