Reviews
Bernard Hughes
By happenstance, this Prom was fully topical, with Debussy’s languorous Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune fitting for one of the hottest days in London’s history, and the “Infernal Dance” from Stravinsky’s Firebird mirroring the infernal political dance taking place simultaneously in Downing Street.The official connection between three of the four items was that they were introduced to British audiences by Henry Wood among the “Novelties” he threw at his audiences, between oodles of Beethoven and Brahms. In each case he spotted a winner, and last night they were presented in exemplary Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Emmanuel (Anthony Ofoegbu) runs Three Kings Barbers in London. His assistant, Samuel (Mohammed Mansaray), is the son of his erstwhile business partner, who is currently in jail. Emmanuel is boss, surrogate father and — occasionally — verbal punching bag: Sam is a whizz with the shears and just as cutting with his tongue. It's not just London in which Inua Ellam's riotous play Barber Shop Chronicles — newly transferred to the Roundhouse from the National Theatre — takes place. Scenes in barber shops in Lagos, Accra, Kampala, Harare and Johannesburg intercut the action in London, where Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s too darn hot, BoJo is in Downing Street, and we’re all going to Brexit hell – so we might as well sing the blues. Or at least take a night off from the apocalypse to enjoy a virtuoso company singing them for us in this rousing revival of Sheldon Epps’ 1980 musical revue, which showcases jazz greats like Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen. It’s also unfinished business for Susie McKenna, who directed a short run at Hackney Empire back in 2014.Sharon D Clarke once again plays The Lady, whose concise narration sets the scene. We’re in a rundown hotel Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As this month’s edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl appears the sun is blazing outside, a heatwave hits, and our record collections must hide in the shadows or warp. Yet still we want more to join them in their sheltered rows and where better to seek the greatest new releases than the longest, most complete monthly round-up of new vinyl releases. As ever, we run the gamut. This time there’s everything from grunge to soul to trap to Qawwali and a whole lot more most of us never imagined could exist. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHQasim Naqvi Teenages (Erased Tapes)Teenages, latest album from New York Read more ...
David Nice
On the UK's biggest day of shame, it was some relief to tap in to the fury of the Russian people at a much greater national degradation (Napoleon's invasion in 1812, Hitler's in 1941). Though it works even better at the end of the first, "Natasha Rostova" part of Prokofiev's selective homage to Tolstoy, his choral epigraph gave us a good blasting at the start in the firm profiling of WNO forces under their music director Tomáš Hanus. The operatic War and Peace, though, is no more just about big gestures than the novel, and Prokofiev's astuteness in characterisation, which can be as assured as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a year ago that BBC One scored a smash hit with the first series of Keeping Faith, but as series two opens 18 months have passed since Faith Howells’s husband Evan (Bradley Freegard) disappeared and triggered a traumatic chain reaction of events. Apparently the patriarch of a close and loving family, with himself and Faith both working in the family law firm, Evan had become embroiled in all sorts of murky stuff (bribery, corruption, perverting the course of justice etc). Was this really the devoted husband and father that Faith had known?All will be revealed across these six new Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Friday 19 July2019 is a big deal in the Supersonic universe, as it marks the fifteenth time that the Festival has been held in Birmingham – the Home of Metal. So, what better way to celebrate than to kick things off with a double header at the City’s iconic Town Hall venue and what better bands to do the honours than local lads, Godflesh and US noise veterans, Neurosis?Despite being July, Birmingham was distinctly soggy as fans queued to get into Town Hall, and not one for acting like a star, Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick hit the stage in an anorak and rucksack with sodden hair. Initially, the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If good intentions were all, The View UpStairs would be Gypsy. As it is, the European premiere of this 2017 Off Broadway musical set in a New Orleans gay bar firebombed by arson in 1973 serves both as an important reminder of a grievous event in LGBTQ history and as an object lesson in the difficulty of writing a persuasive show. At two interval-less hours, the musical at the Soho Theatre takes a long time to get to its inevitably calamitous ending and depends no end on possibly the most name-heavy ensemble (especially for musicals buffs) ever gathered at this address: the cast's commitment Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s a bold idea by director Dominic Savage, to create three improvised dramas for Channel 4 depicting women confronting different forms of crisis. To make it work he needed brave and powerful performers, and this first one starred Vicky McClure (the remaining two will feature Samantha Morton and Gemma Chan).McClure’s Nicola was a hairdresser, caught in a deteriorating relationship with her partner Adam (Perry Fitzpatrick, pictured below with McClure), and she was reaching her wits’ end trying to find a solution. The piece was mostly shot in the couple’s suburban home, the claustrophobic Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Robert James Waller’s bestselling, though critically panned, 1992 romance novel was reincarnated in the Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep-starring film, and then again in Jason Robert Brown and Marsha Norman’s Tony-winning 2013 musical – both adaptations wisely sloughing off some of the original’s schmaltz and sappiness. Now Trevor Nunn, whose Menier-originated Fiddler on the Roof is currently playing in the West End, helms the moderately successful UK premiere.Italian war bride Francesca (Jenna Russell) has been transplanted to Middle America, where she’s raised two children with farmer Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Josh Ritter is in his early forties. He has a two-decade career with 10 studio albums (and, incidentally, a First World War novel) to his name. He has come a long way from trying out open mic nights in Providence, Rhode Island. His albums now regularly make it into the upper reaches of the US folk charts. But he still exudes a boyish charm, a winning and willing smile and obvious enthusiasm for live performing.He now has a substantial songbook and last night, the first of two at Union Chapel, he gave a good selection, some solo with fast fingerstyle guitar, most of them with his regular band Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Secrets, and the voluptuous, sensory pleasures they conceal, may unite Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna and Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, but far more divides two works that make awkward bedfellows in Opera Holland Park’s latest double-bill.Wolf-Ferrari’s 1909 intermezzo is an operatic puff of air – a single, playful thought worked out with exquisite comic elegance in precisely 45 minutes of delicious but disposable music. Tchaikovsky’s fairytale, by contrast, sprawls and swells outside the bounds of its single act, charged with a philosophical and emotional weight that threatens to overbalance Read more ...