Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
You can forgive a certain amount of scepticism. After his now-infamous Royal Opera debut earlier this year, directing a Guillaume Tell that was heavy on concept and light on just about everything else, Damiano Michieletto returns for a Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci that sounded as though it might go the same way. In the flesh, however – and what work-calloused, life-blasted verismo flesh it is too – the production is thoughtful and instinctively theatrical – as good a new show from the company as we’ve seen all year.Imagine the primary-coloured joy and pastel innocence of the Royal Opera’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
One of the joys about this stage adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is the contrast between its phlegmatic hero Phileas Fogg, who deals with everything in terms of precision and logic, and the picaresque confusion of his journey. Fogg (Robert Portal) has the habit of laying down portentous truths in an attempt to mediate the scampering mix-ups that he encounters at every stage. One such aperçu, “A well-used minimum suffices for anything,” serves nicely as a verdict on Lucy Bailey’s energetic, engaging production.Bailey and her designer Anna Fleischle – whose hand drives Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Their songs are some of the most joyous of the Sixties, their glistening doo-wop close harmony and pealing early rock 'n roll guitar sound heady with innocent romance and youthful energy. At the Barbican last night, Ronnie Spector, whose band The Ronettes haven’t been regularly releasing new work for nearly fifty years, effortlessly wound the clock back to the well-groomed early years of rock 'n roll when singing about mother kissing Santa was enough to earn her the title “original bad girl of rock”. She got everyone on their feet, and even though the audience was mostly about her age, there Read more ...
David Nice
Why play a very substantial act of ballet music in concert? In the case of Aurora’s wedding entertainment from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, there are at least three good reasons. It embraces the most inventive and unorthodox of divertissements in any ballet – the one in The Nutcracker comes a close second – and a symphony orchestra deserves the chance to perform at least a substantial chunk of what Stravinsky called Tchaikovsky’s chef d’oeuvre. Besides, you won’t have heard every sequence in any choreographed version, not even the very thorough one by Matthew Bourne, who includes more Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It's hard not to invoke the B word - Barbra, that is, not Brice - and I speak as one who bunked off school to catch her at a midweek matinee when Funny Girl first played London almost 50 years ago. It was standing room only at the Prince of Wales Theatre but by then she was pretty much phoning in her performance, and only the thrill of that voice (smaller than one expected but laser-intense) carried her through. It's quite the reverse with the very talented Sheridan Smith, who is a funny girl and probably closer in spirit to the real Fanny Brice than Streisand could ever be. And with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The arrival of Duran Duran is announced by a barrage of strobes, dry ice creeping about the stage, and the thunder-rumble of an approaching storm through the speakers. There is another noise too. It is the sound of female voices letting rip. They’re doing a loud, heartfelt approximation of the hysterical teen shriek that’s greeted boy bands from The Beatles to One Direction. Duran Duran, after all, are the top dog poster boys of their youth. However, these are women, not girls, and they are in their 40s and 50s so the pitch is lower and the tone less piercing. It is oddly poignant.Accompanied Read more ...
Richard Bratby
You can read a lot into the first two chords of Beethoven’s "Eroica" Symphony. Classical portico or violent detonation? Majestic assertion of E flat major, or the first shocking glimpse of a drama that’s already under way? Michael Seal, conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, accelerated through those first two bars before sweeping into a sleek, swinging first subject. He could afford to let his players sing. Those asymmetrical opening chords had done just enough to subvert the polished surface – to hint at the music’s latent potential for violent disorder.And at critical points Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s been a hugely protracted production history behind Sunset Song. Terence Davies first mooted a screen adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel of northern Scottish farming folk way back in 2000, soon after the success of his Edith Wharton pic The House of Mirth. But what’s emerged, at long last, is classic Davies through and through – luminous and lyrical, sorrowful and celebratory, and, most impressive of all, shot through with an intense compassion for its characters, good and bad alike.In many ways it’s a pretty radical rethink of Gibbon’s novel, which charts the fortunes of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jon Hamm, Mad Men’s swooningly handsome Don Draper, is not only a fine celebrity catch for a series rapidly gathering comic momentum. Since nothing in Toast of London is ever to be taken at face value, Hamm is also two kinds of puns: ham on toast, the snack, and ham, the exaggerated style of acting much in evidence during the show. It all added up to another delicious episode of this extravagantly multi-layered show.Steven Toast spends much of this episode with a bandage on his head, having fallen through the staircase of Ed’s house, which has succumbed to dry rot. It would be a good metaphor Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dan Cruickshank, that enthusiastic architectural historian, who likes nothing better than some scaffolding he can clamber up to get a better look, revealed that as a child of seven he moved some 60 years ago to Warsaw with his family. His father, then a member of the Communist Party, was posted to the Polish capital by the Daily Worker as their correspondent.The young Cruickshank took to his adventure with alacrity. He precociously drew the view over Old Warsaw visible from his family’s apartment. Visiting his old home 60 years later, there was the view again to compare to his preserved Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Two plays for the price of one. What’s not to like? Particularly when they resonate so strongly with each other on a hard, uncompromising theme. Broadly, that theme is love and war, sex and death, but more specifically, both plays home in on the truth games played by a man and a woman at critical moments of intimacy.Howard Barker is a hard, uncompromising playwright, and that may partly explain why his plays (some 60 published since 1970) aren’t more often revived. Rising director Robyn Winfield-Smith is on a mission to put that right, and it was apparently her idea to pair these discreet one Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Last night Rebel Heart began to make sense. For over two hours, performing from the album, her back catalogue, and a couple of well-chosen covers, Madonna sustained both a diversity and intensity in her approach to singing about love and sex that probably no-one else could match. We all knew she could sing “Material Girl” or “Like A Prayer” till the lid came off the O2. When she followed those with Edith Piaf, sung to the ukelele, and held nearly 20,000 people in rapt silence, she gave us a much better idea of what makes her rebel heart beat.The first 40 minutes was a barrage of the new album Read more ...