Reviews
David Nice
That the ever-decreasing circles of Richard Jones’s first Wagner Ring instalment for English National Opera ended in a no-show for the fire that should have made former Valkyrie supreme Brünnhilde proof against all but a fearless hero – Westminster City Council poured cold water on it before this first night – is in a way the least of it.An act which has begun so searingly with a first-rate septet of warrior maidens and blazing orchestra under an ever-masterly Martyn Brabbins fizzles into some very choppy singing for the father-daughter confrontation which should make for one of the most Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Take Jazz Seriously,” wrote Maurice Ravel after his American trip in 1928. This past week of the 2021 EFG London Jazz Festival has seen that advice itself being taken seriously, with a bunching of projects and premieres. Jazz musicians have been welcomed in to work with London orchestras. The fruition of months of preparatory work has been on show.Soweto Kinch’s White Juju is a 75-minute “artistic response to a year of pandemic, racial animus and culture wars”, consisting of 10 pieces. It received a loud, prolonged, vociferous and very enthusiastic reception in a nearly-full Barbican Hall. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Drug companies are supposed to be honest,” says a lady from the Department of Justice, explaining why the US Food and Drug Administration had been treating the pharmaceutical industry with a light, indeed barely detectable, regulatory touch.Dopesick is the story of how the chickens came home to roost when the unscrupulous drugs monolith Purdue launched its painkilling drug OxyContin on an unsuspecting American public, and from the mid-1990s into the 2000s set in motion one of the most devastating health scandals in medical history.Based on the book by Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Where do you draw – how do you draw? – a credible line between jazz and “classical” music in 20th-century America? With the reliably boundary-busting Britten Sinfonia, trumpeter Alison Balsom mixed and matched works from different formal lineages in her packed programme at Milton Court, “An American Rhapsody”. From Stravinsky and Ives to Gershwin and Miles Davis, open-minded and big-hearted dialogue blossomed, led by the sure, sweet and versatile voice of her own “genre-defying instrument” – as she called it in one of the informal chats with conductor Scott Stroman that threaded the items Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Zadie Smith might not be the only writer who can rhyme "tandem" with "galdem", but she’s the only one who can do it in an adaptation of Chaucer. In The Wife of Willesden, her debut play, a modern version of one of the Canterbury Tales, Smith’s talent for mixing high and low is at full power.Indhu Rubasingham’s staging at the Kiln Theatre rattles along with warmth, wit, and a whole lot of heart. The premise is a little flimsy, but forgivably so. Brent has been voted London’s Borough of Culture, and the landlady of the Sir Colin Campbell has organised an open mic night to celebrate. A Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Why are we indifferent to anti-Semitism? In the past few weeks the Royal Court, a proud citadel of wokeness, has been embroiled in an appalling case of prejudice by allowing a character, who is a really bad billionaire, in Al Smith’s new play, Rare Earth Mettle, to be called Hershel Fink. Stereotype, or what?The really stupid thing about this row is not just that Smith created this nominal caricature of a money-obsessed Jew, but also that no one, repeat no one, in this theatre’s script reading process seems to have noticed. Proof, if that was needed, that, as comedian and writer David Baddiel Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The world of the 17th-century tavern is a long way from the contemporary concert hall. A quick glance at the scene in paintings by Jan Steen or his contemporaries shows us a joyful tangle of men and women, dogs, cats and small children, all engaged in a riot of drinking, dancing, brawling, music-making and love-making (occasionally even napping) while hens stroll officiously across the floor pecking up crumbs. It looks noisy, dirty and a jolly good time.There were no dogs or hens (or napping, that I could see) at Bjarte Eike’s latest Alehouse Session at the handsome Middle Temple Hall. But, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Well, this is a first: a comedy show with footnotes. Alfie Brown tells us at the top of the hour that he'll be stepping out of his routines from time to time to explain why the gag he's about to tell, or has just told, isn't offensive. It's a clever touch, one of several in Sensitive Man.Brown is perhaps taking a sensible precaution over being misunderstood because he's a contrarian comic who is happy to tackle sensitive subjects – unplanned parenthood, racism and paedophilia in previous shows – and here he delves into mental health and white male privilege.There's more material about Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's difficult to know if this biopic of Richard Williams – father of Venus Williams and Serena Williams, two of the greatest tennis players ever (perhaps the greatest in the latter's case) – is true to the facts, or just a version of them.The women are listed as executive producers, so it was with a cynical reporter's eye and someone who has a little knowledge of the subject (I've interviewed Richard Williams several times over the years, and attended numerous press conferences given by his daughters), that I watched King Richard. It's an enjoyable appreciation of his role in their success Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Korean-American writer Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, currently enjoying its UK debut at Southwark Playhouse, is presented within a frame that cleverly and radically alters what’s inside it. That would be a sparkly prologue provided by two Persons in Charge: cabaret performers of colour in glittery outfits and spiky headgear that references the Statue of Liberty and African tribal collars; one uses the pronouns he/his, the other she/her. They coquettishly reveal that all the other characters onstage will be straight white men, and each will stay in character for the whole Read more ...
peter.quinn
A fascinating song list that juxtaposed originals with musical theatre, pop songs, Brazilian music and more. An inventive, listening band – take a bow Glenn Zaleski (piano), Alexa Tarantino (flute), Marvin Sewell (guitar), Yasushi Nakamura (bass) and Keito Ogawa (percussion) – who supported singer and song in the most empathetic way possible. And a central performance that combined strength and vulnerability, humour and irony, a strikingly beautiful timbre, and an absolute focus on the lyrics and the story.Vocalist, composer and three-time Grammy winner Cécile McLorin Salvant, together with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A classic specimen of the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” school, Bruised is Halle Berry’s directorial debut. It was back in 2002 that Berry won a Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, and Bruised suggests that, at 55, she may have found a way to sustain a career in Hollywood long after the age when the industry likes to throw its leading women on the scrapheap.She plays Jackie Justice, a successful MMA fighter (that’s Mixed Martial Arts, otherwise known as cage fighting) whose career has disastrously stalled as her personal life has fallen apart. We meet her while she’s living in Read more ...