Reviews
Liz Thomson
What to make of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, which began a week-long residency at London’s Vaudeville Theatre last night and which tours in the new year? A success “from Sydney to Seattle” apparently, with Elaine Paige having called it “amazing” and various regional newspapers offering superlatives. The programme proclaims it (with idiosyncratic use of upper case), "The World's biggest and most successful Simon & Garfunkel Theatre Show". Is there competition?The singing is pretty classy, Sam O’Hanlon as Simon and Charles Blyth as Garfunkel producing evocative close harmony, though Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Enough hyping! This month, without further ado, let’s head straight to the reviews…VINYL OF THE MONTHLOR Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (Lo Records)With Public Service Broadcasting’s The Race for Space making a noise only three years ago (and First Man doing the rounds at the cinema), who’d have thunk there was an appetite for more moon landing-based electronica. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, but Belfast DJ-producer LOR has gone for it anyway, with a deliciously warm and quirky two sides of technotronic goodness. A lunar orbit rendezvous is the process by which astronauts travel from their Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Peter Jackson has form when it comes to re-examining cinema history. In 1995 he made Forgotten Silver, a documentary about Colin McKenzie, a New Zealand filmmaker who not only made the first sound recordings but also invented the tracking shot and the close-up, and pioneered colour film, back in the 1910s long before his counterparts in America and France. His impressive oeuvre was lost until Jackson found the abandoned cans of film in a garden shed. In the Jackson documentary, actor Sam Neill paid tribute to McKenzie, Harvey Weinstein gushed, and film historians like Leonard Maltin Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Missa in Angustiis. Mass in troubled times. There was a logic in programming Haydn’s D minor Mass on the Armistice Centenary day. The final words of the mass, dona nobis pacem, would be the right ones to end this day of reflection. And to juxtapose the Haydn with another, rarely-performed choral work from a later time of instability, Bartók’s Cantata Profana from 1930, which also happens to have its tonal centre in the key of D, was a fascinating idea, on paper at least. There were all kinds of compensations and revelations in this concert, but it was not without its problems or Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When, in 1853, Edward Burne-Jones (or Edward Jones as he then was) went up to Exeter College, Oxford, it could hardly have been expected that the course of his life would change so radically. His mother having died in childbirth, he was brought up by his father, a not particularly successful picture- and mirror-framer in the then mocked industrial city of Birmingham. Early on at King Edward’s School he was marked out as a pupil of promise and transferred to the classics department which enabled him to attend university and prepare for a career in the Church. Yet he never took his degree, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Steve McQueen’s progress from video artist to Oscar-winning director has been deceptively smooth. The chasm between Bobby Sands’ emaciated martyrdom in his feature debut, Hunger (2008), and a star-packed heist film seems still greater. His radical concerns inform Widows, which is set in an America only partly freed from 12 Years a Slave’s racial purgatory. But it lets him slip off his hair-shirt, and play in the genre fields he also loves. Four films in, we don’t yet fully know what kind of film-maker Steve McQueen is.Lynda La Plante’s fondly remembered ITV series Widows, adapted by McQueen Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In a week of flickering memorial candles and cascading poppies we’ve all been asked to contemplate the pity of war – to remember and to seek consolation in beauty and silence. But before we can earn that consolation and mourn in that silence there must surely be rage and noise, bloody specificity before aesthetic abstraction. No composer does rage better than Mark Anthony Turnage, and the return of his First World War opera The Silver Tassie is a bruising, battering experience – a memorial to a conflict we may only know in sepia, but whose wounds were red and raw.Premiered to huge Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between National Theatre people. It’s a chronologically arranged anthology that acts as a history of the institution, from its appearance as an idea around 1906, through its first incarnation at the Old Vic from 1963, then on to its continuing life as a three-theatre powerhouse on the South Bank today.We witness its remarkable talents hard at work, but also happily finding time to snipe, grumble, feud – and carry on; they do hurt feelings, paranoia and betrayed promises with élan, too. As editor Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When Jazz on a Summer's Day was first seen in American cinemas in March 1960, it showed that seeing popular music live could be a leisure activity akin to watching high-end sports. Indeed, director Bert Stern intercut the musical performances he captured on film with footage of yachts trying-out for 1958’s America’s Cup. The audience at Rhode Island’s July 1958 Newport Jazz Festival were caught in the congenial surroundings of the Freebody Park over the event’s four days expressing their appreciation in, generally, a reserved and grown-up fashion.Chuck Berry, who played Newport on the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Because of the #MeToo movement, and the revival of feminist protest, the theme of sisterhood now has a much stronger cultural presence than at the start of the decade. It seems to be a great time to be a female playwright, and Ifeyinwa Frederick's irreverently noisy, and often hilarious, debut play is proof that there is a lot of upcoming new talent waiting to make its mark. So it's great that the Hampstead Theatre, which under Edward Hall has had a very good record in staging work by first-time playwrights, is using its downstairs studio space to host her provocatively titled three-hander, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The trailer for Overlord promises havoc, horror, evil, madness, terror and rage, and to be fair it delivers on most of those. From the fantasy factory of producer JJ Abrams, it’s the ghastly story of an alternative D-Day, in which American paratroopers drop into Normandy only to discover that the Nazis are working on appalling Frankenstein-esque experiments to bring about their “thousand-year Reich”.This isn’t a mega-budget film, but thanks to some ingenious special effects and computerised assistance, it roars out of the screen like a monster truck on a Jack Daniel’s bender. One of the most Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A revelatory moment comes hallway through Wildlife when frustrated American housewife Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan) is observed standing alone in her family’s backyard by her 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), the film’s anxious, steadfast protagonist. Wearing curlers, an off-white sweater and jeans, her face made-up to go out, Jeanette has a harsh, fatalistic look on her face that is new. Initially optimistic, she has been steadily souring on her marriage since her husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), too proud to take back the golf pro job from which he was sacked, departed to fight a Read more ...