Reviews
Marianka Swain
It’s all change once more for Gordon Greenberg’s slick, protean revival, which began life at Chichester back in 2014, as three new leads join the show’s transfer from the Savoy to the Phoenix. If not a revelatory version of this 1950 masterwork, it’s certainly proved its staying power, and should continue ticking along nicely (nicely) both here and in its parallel touring production.Of course, the “musical fable of Broadway” is an irresistible proposition, thanks to the seamless partnership of score and story. Damon Runyon’s affectionate rendering of the Great White Way’s seedy side is, in Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Why are there so few female choreographers? Tamara Rojo, bugged by the fact that in 20 years on the ballet stage she had never danced anything choreographed by a woman, has stopped wondering and started doing something about it. ENB’s latest programme, an evening of three new commissions, sets out to show not only that women dance-makers can be just as accomplished as their better-known and vastly more numerous male counterparts, but also that their work can speak with a distinct voice. The clue is in the overarching title: She Said.But before we get to the dancing, we are presented with an Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s a risky venture, remaking a much-loved Disney classic, but Jon Favreau has tackled The Jungle Book with considerable enthusiasm, creating a digital 3D spectacular complete with hundreds of computer-generated animals and one real boy (Neel Sethi). It’s based on the original Rudyard Kipling stories featuring man-cub Mowgli lost in the jungle, raised by wolves and torn between staying or finding his way back to humanity.But this time it’s not all singing, all dancing – there’s a notable shortage of the witty songs and soft-shoe shuffling which made the 1967 original so charming. Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the gentleman next to me in the Festival Theatre, this was his second outing to see Rusalka. At the production premiere earlier this month in Glasgow, he had been “blown away” by Dvořák's lyric masterpiece. Given half a chance, I would go back to Edinburgh for the second and last performance in this run; not only because this is a brilliant, beautifully judged performance, but also because the opportunity might never come again. Rusalka was last staged in Scotland by a Czech company in 1964. Will we really have to wait until the 2060s to see another?The neglect of Rusalka is puzzling. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2014 the Channel 4 series Confessions looked at the changing face of the old professions. In the programme about doctors, one GP remembered the standard practice of deploying acronyms on patient notes that looked like arcane medical terminology but were in fact nothing of the sort. One of them was NFN, which meant Normal for Norfolk.It’s not quite clear why a new docusoap of that name has adopted it. East Anglian safe spacers may be triggered into a sense of mortal offence followed by noisy excommunication for BBC Two. The title is more harmless than it looks. This is yet another Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cape is not an everyday item of clothing. Worn by magicians, it brings an air of the extraordinary. It billows in the path of superheroes. The cloak of invisibility confirms the cape’s singularity. Basia Bulat was first seen in a sparkly gold cape on the sleeve of her recent Good Advice album and last night it was integral to the renewed vigour of her music and stage persona. Moved to say how hard it was play guitar with its folds fluttering, she nonetheless did not take the easy path and discard it.None of this is to say that Bulat would lack anything without the cape, but it is Read more ...
Holly O'Mahony
In Jaco Van Dormael’s black comedy, God (Benoît Poelvoorde) is an alcoholic arsehole living in 21st-century Brussels, who maliciously causes destruction across the world while bullying his silent wife and daughter Éa. As with much of Dormael’s work, the surreal, in his own words “not yet civilized” vision children have of the world inspires the lens through which we experience the film. Éa (Pili Groyne), God’s rebellious but moral 10-year-old daughter, narrates chunks of the story and is its strong protagonist. Accompanied by her gaggle of eccentric apostles, she flees her prison and sets out Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was Tennessee Williams breaking rules, or breaking apart when he wrote this 1969 play? A bit of both, probably, and the two main characters of the rarely performed In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel face the same choices.It emerged from what the writer would himself admit was a low period of his life – when grief, alcohol and drugs were major players – and was coldly received. “More deserving of a coroner’s report than a review” was a particularly lethal critical line for a piece that does occasionally seem to stare into non-existence. Sometimes painful to experience, the struggle here is to find Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Magical Surfaces: The Uncanny in Contemporary Photography focuses on two contrasting generations. Beginning in the 1970s, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld travelled America photographing things that are so ordinary, yet so odd, that they transcend the familiar to become surreal. And alongside them are five Europeans, 20 or so years younger who, by and large, seem glued to their computers. Joel Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia, December 1978 (main picture) is one of my all-time favourites. In the background is a house on fire; flames are spurting from the roof. Luckily, a crane is in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Contemporary London life in all its forbidding, faceless swirl makes for a visually busy evening at Boy, the Leo Butler play that finally isn't as fully arresting as one keeps wanting it to be. An admirably kaleidoscopic view of the capital as filtered through 17-year-old Liam (Frankie Fox), aka the "boy" of the title, Sacha Wares' production utilises a 26-strong cast to address the notion of aimlessness in our age of austerity – the sheer volume of actors in our midst constituting a welcome rebuke to the pinched economic landscape all its own. But once you've clocked the populous Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The pampered bureaucrats who commission television drama have suffered from tunnel vision for years. Today a thriller series must feature at least four of the following: a family in peril; a dysfunctional investigator; foreign baddies; terrorism; cybercrime; a Chinese connection; striking camera angles and colour filters; moody music; and, above all, a pervasive feeling of dread.The Tunnel: Sabotage, which began on Sky Atlantic last night (with all episodes now available via Sky Box Sets), has the blooming lot. The first series, a cross-channel version of The Bridge, closely echoed its Read more ...
David Nice
It was twelfth night for Christopher Wheeldon's two-year-old, three-act Shakespearean ballet, and this newcomer had one nervous anticipatory question. The verbal music is gone, only the plot remains, so could A Winter's Tale the play inspire Wheeldon to imaginative heights in the way that Romeo and Juliet brought out the best in MacMillan, via Prokofiev? Almost, which is quite a compliment: the same team that brought us Alice's Adventures in Wonderland have pulled off a neat show, and Wheeldon is again working with five of the top dancers he knows best.Perhaps a play with less magical poetry Read more ...