Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in Singin’ in the Rain, or Laurey’s dream in Oklahoma!, whose first interpreter was its choreographer Agnes de Mille.In our own century, Christopher Wheeldon, who started out as a dancer with the Royal Ballet, has had no difficulty straddling the divide between pointework and hoofing – or moonwalking, come to that. In the very same week that this mixed bill devoted to his work opened at the Royal Opera House, he nailed down an Olivier award for his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to have our records on sale in 20 years’ time. To leave something behind when we die." That was September 1990, in a piece tied-in to their soon-to-be-issued debut single.Setting aside the pessimistic proposal of a two-decade lifespan, the ambition has been achieved. And then some. White House Demos is a four-track, 12-inch EP collecting previously unheard demos the band recorded on 15 January 1989, by which point Chapterhouse had played only four live shows. His band’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Songlines Encounters is your round-the-world ticket to great world music and performances, a chance to travel widely in music and culture without the burden of check-ins, passport control, flight delays, or transfers. All you need do is get to Kings Place over this weekend for a festival of world music that encompasses Mali in West Africa, with Rokia Kone from the striking and sensational Amazones d’Afrique on Friday night’s menu, paired in Hall 2 with Kurdish-Anatolian singer Olcay Bahir, who mixes her own songs with Anatolian folk songs.To open on Thursday, audiences had a pairing of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The water proves newly inviting in The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Rattigan's mournful 1952 play that some while ago established its status as an English classic. Lindsay Posner's production, first seen in Bath with one major change of cast since then, takes its time, and leading lady Tamsin Greig often speaks in a stage whisper requiring you to lean into the words. (This is that rare production that, praise be, is unamplified.) But what develops is a study in coping that is required once people arrive at a place beyond hope, not to mention a scalding portrait of the lacerating effect of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's one thing to be indebted to a playwright, as Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter have been at different times to Beckett, or Sondheim's latest musical is to Sartre. But Conor McPherson's The Brightening Air – the title itself is derived from Yeats – comes so fully steeped in Chekhov that you may wonder whether this portrait of rural Ireland in 1980s County Sligo hasn't bled into provincial Russia from nearly a century before, or vice-versa.The protean Irishman's first original play in over a decade, this play can be seen as a response to his starry adaptation of Uncle Vanya, which was on the Read more ...
James Saynor
There’s nothing more healthy than dissing your own dad, and filmmaker Amalia Ulman says that her old man was “a Gen X deadbeat edgelord skater” when she was growing up in the 1990s. The phrase brings the half-forgotten world of Generation X back to us from the mists of time, with its slackers and Douglas Coupland books and mumbling evasions.The New York-based Ulman says she wanted to explore this Gen X world in her second feature, Magic Farm – but rather confusingly she sets it in the present amid the X-ers’ successors, the Millennials. From her angle, there seems scarce difference between Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As every social space in Brighton once again transforms into a mire of self-important music biz sorts loudly bellowing about “waterfalling on Spotify”, it’s also a great time for those who relish gigs by new talent from all over the world. For three days (four, if you count warm-up Wednesday), every nook and cranny has half-hour showcases running from lunchtime until close. And on top of that are the freebie Alternative Escape fringe events.This writer starts in Chalk, arguably Brighton's best venue, an approximately 800-capacity space, open and airy, with great sightlines and an acceptable Read more ...
David Nice
It was a daring idea to mark Ravel’s 150th birthday year with a single concert packing in all his works for solo piano. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet knows them by heart, has bags of charisma and energy, so why not? I could give more than one reason, but the main problem was that while Bavouzet perfectly embodied Scarbo, the monster-Puck of Gaspard de la nuit, and other nocturnal flitters, he seemed careless with Undine and her watery companions, of which there were many.So much felt too loud - does Bavouzet's choice of a Yamaha piano, Richter's favourite, have anything to do with it? - and rushed. No Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Good One is a generation-and-gender gap drama that mostly unfolds during a weekend hiking and camping trip in the Catskills Forest Preserve in upstate New York. A putative indie classic, writer-director India Donaldson’s psychologically acute feature debut focuses on a self-contained, observant young woman, Sam (Lily Collias), whose skepticism about hard-wired male attitudes grows exponentially over the weekend.Sam lives with her gruff sixtyish dad Chris (James LeGros), his second wife, and a much younger stepbrother in a Brooklyn brownstone. On the eve of the hike with Chris and his buddy, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s hard to say who is going to enjoy E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea. Admirers of the modernist designer-architect will be frustrated by how little of her other work is actually visible on screen while fans of feminist biopics might well be underwhelmed by the film’s languid pace and arty flourishes. It’s also a little puzzling that a major incident in Gray's life – the controversy around whether Le Corbusier jealously added frescoes to the all-white villa that Gray had designed on the Côte d'Azur in 1929 – has been covered fairly recently in the drama The Price of Desire Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
In Emmanuel Courcol’s drama The Marching Band (En Fanfare in French, and also released as My Brother's Band), a struggling community band in a mining town in northern French has fallen on hard times. Elements of déjà vu, perhaps?Certainly, if you're from Northern England. But rather than the romance of Mark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996), The Marching Band focuses on the relationship between two brothers (main picture).One, from the high end of metropolitan culture, is orchestral conductor Thibaut Désormeaux (Benjamin Lavernhe). The other, from the hard slog of life in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lucy Farrell, one quarter of the brilliant, award-winning Anglo-Scots band Furrow Collective, and a solo artist whose stunning debut album, We Are Only Sound, was released in 2023, divides her time between the UK – she’s a native of Kent – and Prince Edward Island, a musically rich parcel of land off Canada’s eastern seaboard. The island is home to the other half of this sublime folk-acoustic double bill, Juno Award-winning songwriter Catherine MacLellan.They’re playing small venues across the UK till the end of the merrie month of May – the Blaxhall Sessions in Suffolk and the Hungate Church Read more ...