Reviews
Veronica Lee
Lou Sanders has named her latest show (which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe) Say Hello to Your New Step-Mummy. But, as she tells us in her opening comments, she's not a mother or stepmother, and hasn't yet met a father she likes, but “by the end of the year, God willing…”Much of the show is taken up with Sanders describing the whys and wherefores of her 12th-month “man ban” – something suggested by her healer Jill in the Pyrenees, who does her healing via Skype, and told her she needs to “reset her patterns”.This state of affairs was in some part prompted by trolling that Sanders received Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Ballard and Bosch sound like some dystopian upmarket commodity. They are, but deep in with the low life. They are Michael Connolly’s new duo of detectives, one in semi-disgrace, one retired. Throw in Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, and you’ve got one of the most fascinating and satisfying series of crime novels out there. Throughout the 33 that Connelly has published since 1992, familiar characters turn up regularly. Interconnected webs of professional and personal acquaintances enrich the narratives. Back stories are lightly sketched, as needed. Readers are immersed not only in the varied Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Three years after its release, Gene Clark explained where he was heading while creating 1974's No Other. “I was strongly influenced at that time by two other artists. Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and [The Rolling Stones’s] Goat’s Head Soup. When I was writing No Other I concentrated on those albums a lot, and was very inspired by the direction of them...which is ironic, because Innervisions is a very climbing, spiritual thing, while Goat’s Head Soup has connotations of the lower forces as well. But somehow the joining of the two gave me a place to go with No Other, and I wanted it to go in a Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Paul Essinger has quit life as a professional tennis player and retired to his native Texas where, over the course of seven days, he and his extended family are due to spend Christmas at his parents’ family home. This is the straightforward premise underpinning Christmas in Austin, the second offering from Benjamin Markovits’s Essinger novels, set approximately two years after both A Weekend In New York (2018) and the US Open tournament which brought about its close. Paul lost that first-round tie, and has since lost his girlfriend Dana, in what is the only major change to have occurred prior Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel is a very fine comic, and over the past few years has become an acclaimed author of children's books. So I'm genuinely sad to say that his debut play at Soho Theatre really isn't very good. God's Dice does have its moments, for sure, and some laughs, but at two hours, 15 minutes it's massively overlong and over blown.Baddiel has set himself a big task by tackling a big issue – the interface of science and religion. Alan Davies plays Henry, a quantum physicist teaching at a provincial university, whose certainty about the world is shaken when Edie (Leila Mimmack), a young Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Brittany (Jillian Bell) is the unhappily overweight life of the party, numbing her lonely life with booze and acerbic one-liners as she nears 30. Bad medical news makes her obsessively turn to running, eventually entering the New York marathon, with side-effects include an ambiguous romance with slobby fellow house-sitter Jern (Utkarsh Amdudkar).Playwright Paul Downs Callaizzo’s film debut follows in the path of countless more obvious romcoms and ugly duckling tales in showing her redemption, while artfully complicating their clichés. Based loosely on his friend Brittany O’Neill’s jogging Read more ...
David Nice
When Sean Mathias wrote A Prayer for Wings 35 years ago, the subject of young carers devoting their lives to parents with disabilities had just come as a revelation. That it's still very much a shame under another Tory government keeps this play topical, More important, it's eloquently written, with no false notes to the tedious daily grind of life for Mam and Rita in the disused Welsh church they're renting, and nothing too incredible about the dreams and hopes of the monologues they address to the audience.That helps to make the seemingly fantastical, the presence of angels and devils in Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
To hear Neeme Järvi conduct the Royal Scottish National Orchestra is to witness one of the great musical partnerships, one that has evolved into an enduring friendship. It was in 1984 that the Estonian Järvi was appointed to succeed Sir Alexander Gibson as the then SNO’s principal conductor; as a BBC technician at the time I remember his first radio interview with BBC Scotland – this unknown conductor, from an almost forgotten Baltic state, seemed shy and awkward in front of the microphone and struggled in faltering English to articulate his vision for the orchestra. But what a difference he Read more ...
Tom Baily
Half a billion dollars is what the top five most lucrative estates of deceased musicians earned last year. The figure represents the cunning work of a few people to turn “legacy” into its own immortal industry. To watch a program on this theme is to peek through the keyhole of a locked cabinet. How does the “RIP business” work? How much – so goes another question – are we really allowed to see?Host Ana Matronic guides us through five case studies in posthumous wealth management. Some are success stories, others cautionary tales. Elvis was the King. The fan stardom that has accumulated since Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Tahliah Barnett has been having a rough old time of it. There was that doomed celebrity romance (Robert Pattinson) and some health issues (I’m not entirely sure if we need to know about her operation to have fibroids removed) but suffering, as we are all aware, is the fuel of creativity. Unclassifiable but leaning towards the classical, fka twigs’ gut-wrenching, soul-bearing second album – her first since the Mercury Prize nominated LP1 – showcases her soprano vocals against bare, eerie arrangements which will without doubt never be played in a club. Upbeat this is not; but Read more ...
David Nice
For the first 20 or so minutes and the second encore of this generous recital, I turned into a Trifonite, in thrall to the 28-year-old Russian pianist's communicative powers. Has Scriabin, in an imperious sweep from early to late, ever made more consistent sense? Could anyone else transcribe the opening sleigh-ride into mysticism and back of Rachmaninov's "choral symphony" The Bells, his most lustrously orchestrated movement, and come out shining?Even when he's bending the music to his own seemingly mercurial will, Trifonov is never less than watchable and worth hearing, though whether his Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Rochdale boasts quite a number of star turns but those that spring readily to mind are William Walton, Andy Kershaw, Barb Jungr, Gracie Fields and Lisa Stansfield. And here’s a good pub quiz question: what, apart from Rochdale, links Gracie and Lisa? It’s their shared surname! Gracie dropped the first four letters and rearranged the remaining five. Lisa, who was born up the road in Manchester, kept it.It’s 30 years this year since Stansfield made her solo debut with Affection, which delivered several hit singles and which, with sales of five million, is the biggest of the eight albums she’s Read more ...