Reviews
Florence Hallett
Painted in ice-cream shades punctuated with vivid red, the series of portraits made by Picasso in the early weeks of 1932 are as dreamy as love letters. His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walther – we assume it is she – lies adrift in post-coital languor, her body spread before us as a delicious and endlessly fascinating confection. But the mood shifts from picture to picture, and she appears by turns as a wisp-like erotic reverie, an imposing, moon-faced goddess, and, in a flash of humour that teeters on the edge of cruelty, a cartoonish blob of a creature with a long, upturned snout (Pictured below Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I left this concert a bit depressed, but not because of anything I heard: rather, by the conservatism of London concert-goers. As London orchestras focus on programming the usual wall-to-wall Brahms, Beethoven and Mahler, the LPO was rewarded for their excursion from the well-trodden path by the punters staying away in droves from this imaginative programme.As part of their Changing Faces: Stravinsky’s Journey year-long season, we heard two works from his 1920s output, paired with older pieces in the same vein of good humour and wit. Weber’s Konzertstück was a direct model for Stravinsky’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
No, this isn't the large-scale Kander and Ebb musical, which opened in 1992 in London before transferring for a sizeable run on Broadway. Laurie Sansom's expert production instead both revisits and revises the lesser-known source of that song-and-dance adaptation: an intimate two-hander (with a prison guard thrown in for good measure) between a gay window-dresser and an ardent revolutionary who find themselves sharing a prison cell in 1975 Argentina. William Hurt won an Oscar for the showier of the two roles, but the Menier Chocolate Factory revival boasts two ideal interpreters in Samuel Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's long been a theatrical given, especially in musicals, that characters need to be seen to change: a climactic duo in the eternally crowd-pulling Wicked makes that abundantly clear. ("Because I knew you," goes the lyric, "I have been changed for good.") But what happens when people can't or won't change, and are so ground down by circumstance and their own temperament that they retreat inwards until they implode?That's the situation at the provocative and ever-stirring heart of the Tony Kushner/Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change, whose revival at Hampstead Theatre boasts a central Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The American artist, Joan Jonas is one of the pioneers of performance art. Now 82, she is being honoured with a Tate Modern retrospective and Ten Days Six Nights, a festival of live art in which many of her performances are being recreated.Traditionally in art, women were allocated the roles of model and muse. Frustrated by such limited options, in the 1960s many courageous women began developing careers as artists in their own right. Many chose performance art because, unlike painting and sculpture, it wasn’t freighted with a history dominated by men. The genre allowed women Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You could call it an absence of yellow. Until very recently British theatre has been pretty poor at representing the stories of Chinese and East Asian people, and even of British East Asians. In 2016, Andrew Lloyd Webber called British theatre “hideously white” and, despite the sterling work of groups such as Yellow Earth theatre company, there have been several casting controversies where white actors have played Chinese and East Asian characters. So the first thing to say about Francis Turnly’s epic The Great Wave, staged by the National Theatre in a co-production with the Tricycle Theatre Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The packed crowd at the Jazz Café was fired up by a sizzling samba soul band led by Kita Steuer on bass and vocals, singing along to a production line of hits, complete with dynamic brass section and superior percussion. All songs by a singular Brazilian artist, Tim Maia, who died 20 years ago and whose music was being celebrated.We do live in a tribute act world these days – what started with the Bootleg Beatles and at least 15 Abba tribute bands has become universal and spread to more cult artists. Upcoming just at the Jazz Café include evenings dedicated to Serge Gainsbourg, Gil Scott Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Shakespeare's death-laden play is alive and well and breathing with renewed force in Hackney, the last British stop for an RSC touring Hamlet that moves on from London to the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC in May. Let's hope the American capital takes to Simon Godwin's characteristically acute, alert production with the palpable affection that was afforded the staging closer to home one recent evening. Of Paapa Essiedu's occupancy of the title role, one thing seems clear: were the play's States-side sightings continuing westward to LA, this charismatic actor might risk being lost to the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons: A Reimagining – it’s not a title that trips off the tongue. Nor one, frankly, that inspires much excitement, with its clunky functionality and on-trend buzzword. But set that aside and buy a ticket immediately, because Gyre & Gimble have made magic with their latest show.Founded in 2014 by former War Horse puppeteers Finn Caldwell and Toby Olie, Gyre & Gimble’s style of puppet-led theatre has established itself in productions including The Grinning Man, The Lorax and The Elephantom as some of the most thoughtful and joyful to be seen on stage. But with The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When ITV scheduled this new series of The Durrells for mid-March, they probably didn’t imagine it would coincide with the return of the Beast from the East, with its blizzards and plummeting temperatures. Under these deep-frozen circumstances, what could be more reassuring than to batten down the hatches and take a trip to the glittering Mediterranean and the mountains, blue skies and historic architecture of Corfu?Profundity is not the ambition of Simon Nye’s dramatisations of Gerald Durrell’s books. In our age of knotty and treacherously-plotted thrillers, full of mutilated corpses and Read more ...
Robert Beale
Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is a ‘"fairytale opera" (its composer’s description), and yet one characteristic frequently commented on is its "Wagnerian" scoring. For this production, with David Pountney’s English translation, the RNCM used Derek Clark’s reduced orchestration.Good idea, because the college has always been concerned that still-maturing voices should not be forced into trying to dominate massive orchestral sounds, and with that in mind has in recent years often provided surtitles for the audience to follow, even when the sung language was English. This time they Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To Belgium for the latest continental instalment of murder really rather unpleasant. 13 Commandments, yet another crime drama brought to Channel 4 under the auspices of Walter Presents, began with the grizzliest manner imaginable. A man arrived at an airport, and was greeted reverentially by a driver who ferried him to a terraced house in a run-down street. There two thugs delivered a young woman into his possession. He drove her off to an abandoned house, tied her up, donned gloves and slit her throat. You rather hoped the camera would not show the last detail, but no, it panned just low Read more ...