Reviews
Marianka Swain
Vaudeville is having quite the West End moment, with Funny Girl inheriting the Savoy from Gypsy and Mrs Henderson Presents over at the Noël Coward. Gypsy is the pick of the bunch dramatically, delivering theatre history with real psychological heft, but Sheridan Smith’s luminous Fanny Brice gives Funny Girl a fighting chance. She’s such a natural vaudevillian that you begin to wonder if she’s somehow been transported from another age.Smith isn’t a vocal match for original Fanny Barbra Streisand (who is?), though the loss of otherworldly balladry actually makes for a more convincing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Catching the essence of the mercurial, secretive and notoriously abrasive Miles Davis on film might reasonably be described as a mission impossible, but Don Cheadle has put his heart and soul into it. He directed it and plays the title role, he co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Baigelman, and he put some of his own money into it. A jazz saxophonist since his youth, he took tips from Wynton Marsalis about playing the trumpet for the movie.The results are both better and worse than you might have expected. Cheadle succeeds remarkably well at embodying Davis in the different periods in his Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A Pulitzer Prize and numerous walkouts: The Flick, infamously, courts extreme reactions. Yet this latest American import is dedicated to minutiae. In Annie Baker’s slow-burning (three hours-plus), microscopic epic, her lens is trained on ordinary people, mundane tasks, arid pauses and inarticulate speech that trails… off.Though this may initially seem like indulgent anti-drama, the brilliance of Baker’s strategy soon becomes clear. We become so attuned to life in the rundown movie theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts that the smallest alteration feels like a seismic shift. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This Paris-set thriller was one of several films which had its release date postponed in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the French capital last November, giving the impression that it might be shockingly violent or provocatively political. In fact, it's a slightly uneasy mix of caper, buddy-movie and spy adventure, as its protagonists battle a high-level conspiracy involving the mother of all bank robberies.You can imagine that director Jason Watkins (The Woman in Black) and screenwriter Andrew Baldwin may have had in mind such vintage Parisian adventures as Charade or Polanski's Read more ...
David Nice
Janáček's lacerating music-drama of love-led sin and redemption in a 19th century Moravian village is the opera I'd recommend as the first port of call for theatregoers wary of the genre. Its emotional truths are unflinching, its lyricism as constantly surprising as the actions of its characters are often swift and violent. In the opera house, I've never seen a performance that didn't turn its audience inside out. For all the revelations of orchestral beauty, though, a concert performance without a hint of semi-staging can't hope to achieve anything like the same effect, however fine the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Charlotte Keatley’s 1987 feminist classic is one of the most often performed plays by a woman writer. It is typical of its time in that this story of four generations of women in one family not only explores the theme of mothers and daughters, but does so with an innovative and experimental approach to theatre form. This revival by the ever-enterprising St James Theatre stars national treasure Maureen Lipman, along with Olivier-Award winner Katie Brayben, who created the lead role in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.The plot of Keatley’s play has a lovely elegance: Doris, who was born out Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So just how grey were the 1950s? "It was grey," said Bruce Welch of The Shadows. Au contraire, said Joan Bakewell, the Fifties were "giddy and full of optimism." Veteran journalist Katharine Whitehorn added that not only were the Fifties not boring, but that even then people had already heard of sex.But this was Tom Jones's film, and in his view "the early Fifties were grey and boring and flat." Born in June 1940, the then Thomas Woodward spent his formative years in Pontypridd, and in the foggy old films and photos of it included here the town resembled some ghastly failed experiment in Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The last time I spent hours on end listening to Xavier Rudd I was giving birth to my daughter. Weirdly, the anaesthetist had seen him perform in Australia a few weeks previously (this was a few years ago when Rudd wasn’t as heard of as he is now) and we bro’d about the magical coincidence pretty hard, in between contractions.To see him live was therefore a pretty big deal, seeing as what he essentially (musically) birthed my baby. There was a lot to live up to. I am thankful in life for many things – the fact that seeing him in the flesh did not disappoint, is one of them. The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Look at the pictures”, yells apoplectic Senator Jesse Helms as he brandishes a clutch of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, “a known homosexual who died of AIDS”. It's 1989 and Senator Helms is doing his level best to close down an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati and have its director, Dennis Barrie, indicted for obscenity.This outpouring in the House of Representatives provides the title and sets the scene for Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbarto. We have to wait until the closing shots, though Read more ...
mark.kidel
Andrew Hilton’s new production of All’s Well That Ends Well makes the most of the complexities of a "problem play", neither comedy nor tragedy, and navigates this startling mix of emotional depth and light farce with great deftness. This is Shakespeare as master trickster, playing with narrative genres, the tricks of his characters matching the sleight of hand and suspension of disbelief displayed in a story that combines the simple manicheism and magic of fairy tale with the realities of gender politics, reflections on the inconstancy of human nature and the inifinite and sometimes Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
So... what the hell is Miitomo? When Nintendo announced it was moving into mobile apps, the smart money seemed to be on iOS and/or Android ports of choice titles from the company’s deeply-stacked library of classic games. Maybe a mobile Super Mario Bros conversion, a phone-sized dose of Super Metroid or the chance to re-live The Legend Of Zelda on your iPhone.But no. Nintendo has released Miitomo - a title that is sorta, kinda, possibly a game but in fact is something closer to a social network. In some ways, it is a sort of spiritual successor to the old Everybody Votes opinion poll channel Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It can be given to few commercial galleries to have sustained a relationship with the same artist for over 130 years, but such is the link between The Fine Art Society and James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).The FAS was founded in 1876, and is still in its purpose-built original home in New Bond Street. The frontage was designed by EW Godwin, who also designed Whistler’s White House in Chelsea. It has many firsts to its credit, including commissioning Whistler to produce his superbly atmospheric etchings of Venice, which were published by the gallery in 1880. In 1883 Whistler’s monographic Read more ...