Reviews
David Nice
Asked to choose five or ten minutes of favourite Berlioz on the 150th anniversary of his death (yesterday), surely few would select anything from his giant Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts). This is a work to shock and awe, not to be loved - music for a state funeral given a metaphysical dimension by the composer's hallmark extremes in original scoring. It cries out for an ecclesiastical edifice to resonate with the masses and provide the voids, but St Paul's Cathedral has always been one step too far: glorious to be in, not the place for a true musical experience. All things considered, John Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Modern’s retrospective of Dorothea Tanning is a revelation. Here the American artist is known as a latter day Surrealist, but as the show demonstrates, this is only part of the story. Tanning’s career spanned an impressive 70 years – she died in 2012 aged 101 – but as so often happens, she was eclipsed by her famous husband, German Surrealist Max Ernst. They met in New York; he was scouting for artists to include in an exhibition staged by his then wife, Peggy Guggenheim. On the easel in Tanning's studio was Birthday, 1942 (pictured below right) a newly finished self portrait. The Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Selfish, cunning, cynical, the older generation has screwed up the world with aggression abroad and dishonesty at home. Can their children make it good again? This family drama of transgression and reparation threads through Idomeneo, the opera that Mozart – who had his own troublesome issues with both biological fathers and father-figure patrons – premiered in Munich in 1781. As it lifts the (by then) somewhat musty conventions of opera seria to formerly unimagined heights in a plot about returnees from the Trojan War and the cost their offspring pay for the elders’ bloodstained vanity, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In one of the award-winning club’s forays from its Camden Town home, Green Note welcomed International Women’s Day with a special one-off concert exploring and celebrating the many ages and stages of being a woman. Three generations of musicians were on stage at North London’s JW3. The youngest, The Rosellas, an a cappella trio who met at school and who are now making quite a name for themselves, before shortly dispersing (temporarily one hopes) across the country to uni.It was a life-affirming evening enjoyed by an audience that included a healthy Read more ...
Owen Richards
As collaborations go, it’s a doozy. Karen O’s signature vocals over Danger Mouse’s production – it was always going to pique interest. And Lux Prima does much to meet expectations, gorgeous cinematic soundscapes that flit between haunting and defiant. At its best, its damn near mesmerising. But for those expecting a genre-defying, structure-blowing new horizon, it falls just short.Of course, those parameters are wholly unfair to judge an album, but it was hard not expect something ground-breaking after the titular lead single “Lux Prima”. Clocking in over nine minutes, a synth groove Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Lisa, the kindergarten teacher in question (a mesmerising Maggie Gyllenhaal), is taking evening classes in poetry. Twenty years of teaching and raising her three kids, now monosyllabic, mean teens, have left her desperate for culture and a creative outlet. Her stolid husband (Michael Chernus) tries his best to be supportive, but he doesn’t really get it. “My teacher says I need to put more of myself into my work,” she sighs, as she picks at a dull salad at home in Staten Island after class. Well, that’s not going to happen.Director Sara Colangelo’s adaptation of a 2014 Israeli film of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's a lovely, quietly subversive musical lurking somewhere in Waitress, and for extended passages in the second act that show is allowed to shine through. The flip side means putting up with an often coarse first act that seems to have taken its cue from its sister show in female emancipation, the Dolly Parton-scored 9 to 5, playing down the street. The advantage for Waitress is Grammy ceremony semi-regular Sara Bareilles's eclectic and catchy score, and a clutch of winning performances capable of taking even the hoariest material (you've seen almost all these characters before) and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The limitless goodwill generated by The Office earned Ricky Gervais the right to do and say as he pleased. Thus, hosting the Golden Globes, he was toweringly rude to Hollywood royalty. In Extras he gleefully portrayed celebrities as vain and ghastly. In The Invention of Lying he explored the logical consequence of a world in which people say what they really think. Add to that the brisk frankness of his stand-up shows, in which he insulted the religious and derided the overweight. Speaking the truth was his self-styled superpower.His misanthropy arrives at a logical terminus in After Life ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s a parental nightmare that’s virtually impossible to comprehend – a missing child. But however disturbing, that dilemma is not the chief concern of the Iranian writer/director Ashgar Farhadi’s latest drama. As ever, he’s interested in the psychological scars and relationship fault-lines that a crime or misdeed can expose. Farhadi is a master at building tension from moral dilemmas, behavioural detail, awkward family relations that are complicated by the past, by secrets, by lies. He’s won two foreign language Oscars, for A Separation and The Salesman, both set in his Read more ...
David Nice
Hallucinatory theatre has struck quite a few times in the Barbican's international seasons. On an epic scale we’ve had the Shakespeare compendiums Kings of War and Roman Tragedies from Toneelgroep Amsterdam, newly merged with the city's Stadsschouwburg to form this present company. Most concentrated in intensity of vision, in my experience, have been director/playwright Simon Stone's Belvoir Theatre Sydney adaptation of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, and now his Dutch Medea for our times. They almost make a diptych, with the same hermetic acting space - this time white and open, not black and glassed Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There have been two relatively recent, welcome correctives in what is grandiosely referred to as the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” – a move towards diversity (Black Panther) and a sharp injection of comedy (Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok). With Captain Marvel the studio combines the two elements, resulting in one of the more breezily enjoyable and emotionally satisfying of the franchise. And in Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, it has an actress and a heroine ready to take over from Robert Downey Jr/Tony Stark/Iron Man as the Avenger’s top dog. What a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not just the Peter Pan of Pop, but also its very own Houdini. With the aid of shed-loads of money, an illusion-spinning PR machine and the most aggressive lawyers that money could buy, Michael Jackson managed to make it to his premature exit in 2009 without being sent to jail. Dan Reed’s sprawling two-part documentary Leaving Neverland comes to bury Jackson, and to do posthumously what nobody managed to achieve in his lifetime.Reed focuses on the stories of two boys who became, for a time – or perhaps forever, considering the terrible emotional legacy it all left them with – Jackson’s pets. Read more ...