Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
This March, a real-estate office in Miami Beach, Florida, put a parcel of prime seafront land on the market. A vacant estate with plans filed for a luxury mansion, the plot at 5860 North Bay Road cost $15.9 million. It also happens to be the site of a now-demolished pink-washed house owned by drug lord Pablo Escobar until his killing in 1993. Reputedly, the Colombian cocaine king stashed treasure in secret hidey-holes here, as at his other properties. When the wreckers came in 2016, they found two well-hidden safes – one of them later stolen. All true. On this terrain of bizarre Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It was inevitable that Rod Stewart’s distracting solo adventures would eventually kill off Faces, the band he fronted. Less predictable was the departure during their lifetime of another founder member, their bassist and key songwriter Ronnie Lane. A hint the split was coming arrived in late 1972 when Lane and Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood recorded the soundtrack music to the film Mahoney's Last Stand while their band began work on the Ooh La La album.At that point, Stewart was then riding high with his Never a Dull Moment album, a US and UK smash. In March 1973, the singer churlishly Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It would be great to herald this low-budget drama about an elderly drag queen and his friendship with a young gay singer-songwriter as a little gem of British indie cinema. But Tucked, which aims to be an odd-couple tale of heart-warming redemption, is pretty dispiriting with its slow pace and predictable plot. We first meet Jackie belting out ‘I Will Survive’ wearing inch thick make-up and heels. He's telling tired, misanthropic jokes about sex in a nightclub. He's the oldest tranny in town and even before the titles appear, he's being told that he has terminal cancer and weeks to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shows by Gravity & Other Myths fall into the realm of “contemporary circus”. It’s an off-putting moniker, bringing to mind a performance where there’s no clowning but quite possibly much “thought-provoking” interpretive dance. The decade-old troupe from Adelaide, Australia, appearing tonight in Brighton’s Dome Theatre, deliver a show that is certainly contemporary circus, but they reinvent the term in in a riveting, entertaining way.Proceedings begin with the house lights coming up to reveal the stage cluttered by a rack of clothes, a line of steel buckets, a suit of armour and more. It’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Most of the facts about the Atlantic slave trade are well known; what is less easily understood is how history can make a person feel today. A question which invites an experimental approach in which you test out emotions on your own body. In 2016, the artist Selina Thompson did just that. Along with a filmmaker friend she made a boat trip from Britain to Ghana, then travelled to Jamaica, then back again. Part of Thompson's wider project of exploring Black British identity, this show is the result of that trip. It has already been seen in at the Southbank Centre and Edinburgh in 2017, where Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Do you know why I’m respected?” demands Ursula (Carmiña Martinez), a Wayuu matriarch in La Guajira in northern Colombia, of Rapayet (José Acosta), who wants to marry her daughter Zaida (Natalia Reyes, soon to star in James Cameron’s Terminator reboot). “Because I’m capable of anything for my family and my clan.”Directed by Ciro Guerra and his ex-wife Cristina Gallego – their Embrace of the Serpent, in which he directed and she produced, was nominated for an Oscar in 2016 – the mesmerisingly beautiful Birds of Passage covers the decades between 1960 and 1980 and the bonanza marimbera era of Read more ...
peter.quinn
While some vocalists build an entire career on a 'one-timbre-fits-all' approach, one of Claire Martin's greatest strengths is the way in which she brings all of the different colours of her voice into play such that each song is allowed to resonate in the most powerful way.This was the second of two nights at Ronnie Scott’s which saw the award-winning vocalist performing material from Believin’ it, Martin’s twentieth release on Linn Records and her first album with her new all-Swedish trio: pianist Martin Sjöstedt, bassist Niklas Fernqvist and drummer Daniel Fredriksson, with Johan Ramsay Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
We return, after only a week away, with Part 2 of Volume 49. Starting out with an amazing comeback from Adrian Sherwood’s Pay It All Back compilation series as Vinyl of the Month, this edition takes in everything from Prince to death metal to ambient classical. From reissues to spanking new fare, all life on vinyl is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious Pay It All Back Volume 7 (On U Sound)To ancient music warriors who recall prehistory, before ’88 and acid house, one of only places in Britain where electronics splurged into brain-frying psychedelic dance music was On U Sound. Their Pay It Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s 15 years since Benjamin Grosvenor first strolled onto our TV screens as a prodigiously gifted child in the BBC Young Musician Competition. Today he is a self-possessed young man of 26, in his element on the concert platform, yet without a hint of affectation; and unlike certain musicians who play the same type of music all the time, he ventures constantly into new and sometimes surprising musical territory.This recital was part of a Barbican series that also includes two chamber music concerts with the Doric String Quartet at Milton Court (the next is on 26 May). Grosvenor tackled an all Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Keanu Reeves’s hitman franchise is blossoming into a delirious little earner. This third instalment reunites the star with director Chad Stahelski – who used to be Keanu’s stunt double in the Matrix films – and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, and keeps the action cranked to melting point for its two-hours-plus running time.The narrative picks up where 2017’s John Wick: Chapter 2 left off, with Wick declared “excommunicado” by the crime lords of the High Table and running for his life through New York City as massed assassins queue up to kill him and collect the $14m reward. Drolly, the killers Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In the week that the Jeremy Kyle show has been yanked permanently off air after the death of one of its vulnerable guests, the timing couldn’t have been better for the BBC to show how sensitively the old-school broadcaster handles contributors with mental health problems.On Wednesday night, Bake Off star Nadiya Hussain movingly explored her daily struggle with panic attacks without being forced to expose too much detailed information about the childhood traumas which lay at the root of her anxiety disorder. The producers didn’t feel the need to track down and drag onscreen the schoolmates who Read more ...
David Nice
Leaving a revival performance of Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a friend asked Hans Werner Henze, also in the audience, that dreaded question: "what did you think?" "Very competent and extremely well performed," came the answer. What snap judgment can one form about Phaedra, his own late mythological fantasia, which also features a bass as the half-man, half-bull, but keeps its labyrinth – in this production, at any rate – to the music and the bizarre wraps around the story of Phaedra's passion for her stepson Hippolytus? Extremely well sung and played by superb young artists, jury out Read more ...