Reviews
graham.rickson
You’d expect a degree of mischief and bafflement in an opera about mistaken identity, closing with a scene set at a masked ball. But Tim Albery’s new Opera North Un ballo in maschera is confusing for the wrong reasons, its shortcomings all the more irritating compared how good the performance actually sounds. Verdi was forced by censors to relocate his 18th century Swedish shenanigans to Boston, his real life protagonists recast as nonsensical fakes (King Gustav becoming "Riccardo, Earl of Warwick"). Albery sensibly returns us to Northern Europe, the sets and costumes suggesting that we’re in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hannah Gadsby was awarded best show (jointly with John Robins) at the 2017 Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Nanette, which had already been given the equally prestigious Barry award at last year's Melbourne Comedy Festival. Gadsby draws us in gently, telling us that Nanette was so titled before she really knew what the show was going to be about, and she named it after meeting an unfriendly and unhelpful barista in smalltown Australia, in one of those places that she – a lesbian who is sometimes taken for a man – feels really unwelcome in.That's probably the lightest moment in Nanette's 80 minutes Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Kendrick Lamar has never been afraid to experiment. Since his first studio album, Section 80, was released in 2011, he’s explored funk, jazz, rock, soundtracks, ballads, and (of course) hip-hop, building himself a reputation based as much on his musical risks as his outspoken political views (as seen in the Black Lives Matter-orientated To Pimp A Butterfly, released to critical acclaim in 2015). Although latest album DAMN. is perhaps his most conventional to date, the wit, religious allusion, and vague sense of unease lurking beneath the surface are fully brought out live, making Lamar’s set Read more ...
Katherine Waters
"I've been known to stroke concrete," writes self-professed geek Roma Agrawal – and from the very beginning of her memoir-cum-introduction to structural engineering, Built, where she describes her awe as a toddler at the glass and steel canyon of Manhattan, the structural is personal.The book is divided by materials, elements and concepts – “Sky”, “Clean”, “Rock”, “Force”, and “Clay” are all chapter titles – and each hones in on a particular structure by weaving together the stories of the people who built them, the social and historical context in which they were conceived and built, and the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Britain, 1965 began with The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” at the top of the single’s chart. In December, the year bowed out with their double A-side “Day Tripper” / “We can Work it Out” in the same position. But 1965 was not just about The Beatles.According to the writer Jon Savage, “1965 was the year of Dylan, folk-rock and protest, and the year when the post-beat bohemian subculture took over from traditional showbiz as the principal youth culture. Suits and group uniforms were out: denim, suede and long hair in. It was also a vintage Motown year. It wasn’t like an Austin Powers film, with a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The last time Theatre of Voices performed Stockhausen’s STIMMUNG in London was at the Albert Hall, at a late night Prom in 2008, so Kings Place made for a much more intimate setting. In fact, the work, which is for six unaccompanied voices, relies heavily on electronic amplification, so can be adapted to almost any environment. And Kings Place proved perfect, with its sympathetic acoustic and hi-tech audio array. Some mood lighting completed the atmosphere, creating a comfortable but slightly surreal ambiance, somewhere between concert and séance.In STIMMUNG, six singers sit cross-legged Read more ...
Phoebe Michaelides
Texan trio Khruangbin are a rare concoction, psychedelic rockers, for sure, but seamed with all manner of global influences, notably Thai pop but also running the gamut from Latin sounds to Middle Eastern scaling. Hitting the UK in support of their second album, Con Todo El Mundo, they initially presented an aloof front, which was compromised briefly by a minor technical glitch.This didn’t distract from the band’s striking retro-future aesthetic, especially bassist-singer Laura Lee, who wore a chic white leotard and red thigh-high boots like a supersonic empress from a kitsch old sci-fi film Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Opera-lovers: if you’ve finally had enough of the wheelchairs and syringes, the fifties skirts and heels, the mobile phones and the white box sets, and the rest of the symbolic paraphernalia of the right-on modern opera production, pop along to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and catch up with Michael Blakemore’s quarter-century old staging of Puccini’s great warhorse. Blakemore’s Tosca (with designer Ashley Martin-Davis) ticks every box on the traditionalist’s questionnaire, from the plausible (if not accurate) Sant’ Andrea della Valle of Act 1 to the only slightly rearranged Castello Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If the Small Faces weren’t quite The Beatles or the Stones, they were one of the classic British bands of their era, and their recordings are treasured by ancient Mods, Damon Albarn, Noel Gallagher and even discerning representatives of today’s youth. Carol Harrison’s stage musical, evidently a labour of love by a devoted fan who knew singer Steve Marriott back in the day, successfully evokes the thrills and chaos of the mid-Sixties music business, and (better still) features an onstage band which manages to do the music justice.The quartet’s career only lasted from 1965 to 1969, which means Read more ...
Owen Richards
When first announced, Derry Girls seemed a strange prospect. Derry during The Troubles wasn’t an obvious choice for a sitcom; neither was writer Lisa McGee, whose only previous comedy outing London Irish was slammed for negative stereotyping. Not many would have predicted one of the funniest new shows of the year, but that’s what we got.In last night’s final episode, Erin seized control of the school’s magazine after the editor was struck down by illness. Abandoned by the team for her brazen opportunism (and basic lack of decency), she formed a ragtag editorship from the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
After the anger, the emptiness… Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is his fifth film, and harks back to the world of complicated, somehow unelucidated family relationships that characterised his debut, The Return, the work that brought Zvyagintsev immediate acclaim back in 2003. His previous film, the tempestuous Leviathan from four years ago, was defined by a degree of social involvement that was new in his filmmaking, and engaged with contemporary Russia through the prism of politics. Its story of a lone individual’s clash with the corrupt society that surrounded him could not Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“I don't want to talk about Donald Trump,” Andrew Maxwell tells us as he comes on stage at the beginning of Showtime, because no matter what comics make up about the US President, he then goes and does something more weirdly comic, more comically weird, than they could ever invent.Instead the Irish standup, who has lived in the UK for the greater half of his life, muses on Brexit and beyond, seeing the world through a resident's eyes – but with the sharp observation of someone who will always remain an outsider.Daftness always quickly follows the seriousTalking of which, this keen European Read more ...