Reviews
Marina Vaizey
This "mockumentary" concerning the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was incredibly well-intentioned and unintentionally baffling. It operated on so many levels at once that the viewer could all too easily keep falling through the cracks. Was it about the wonderfully successful play and its productions, the novel that inspired it, or, in the real world, children and adults on the autistic spectrum, and their interaction with society?The conceit is that the programme was itself a documentary made by Christopher Boone, the 15-year-old hero, about the play in which he was Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American director Sean Baker is an adept at exploring different Los Angeles worlds that we don’t often see portrayed in standard Hollywood fare. His much-acclaimed Starlet, from 2012, took us into the city’s porn industry (in an entirely non-judgmental way), ticking most of the boxes usually associated with “independent” cinema.Tangerine goes further out on a limb, and proves an energy-driven piece that seems to breathe the life of the seedy streets of the less salubrious end of Santa Monica Boulevard around which it’s set. Baker developed his story of two transgender prostitutes by working Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The curse of Tamerlano strikes again. The last time London saw Handel’s darkest and most sober opera was in 2010. Graham Vick’s production for the Royal Opera House lost its unlikely star Placido Domingo before it even opened in London, ran interminably long and lost any emotional impetus somewhere in the course of its three-and-a-half hours. To say, then, that last night’s concert performance from Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d’Oro made an even poorer job of the piece is not to dismiss it lightly.The Barbican have fine form where baroque opera is concerned. We’ve become used to concert Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Verdi’s dark tale gets even darker in this new staging from Calixto Bieito. He updates the story to the Spanish Civil War, a setting with plenty of opportunity for his trademark violence but also offering illuminating parallels on the story itself. ENO has assembled a fine cast for the occasion, and the musical direction, from Mark Wigglesworth, is dynamic and dramatically engaged. The result is a staging that gives rare focus to this sprawling score, and to its grim implications of tragedy and fate.Bieito explains that the civil war setting offers a parallel to the central family drama of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Sculpture that moves with the gentlest current of air! Sculpture that makes you want to do a little tap dance of joy! Or maybe the Charleston – swing a leg to those sizzling Jazz Age colours and shapes and rhythms. Look, that’s the queen of the Charleston right there – the “Black Pearl” of the Revue Nègre, Josephine Baker. She’s a freestyle 3D doodle in space, fashioned out of wire: spiral cones for pert breasts, that sinuous waist described by a single serpentine line. What a callipygous shimmy. And who’s that with the Chaplin moustache? Why, it’s the head of Fernand Léger (pictured below Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Penned by Tom Rob Smith, the author of Soviet-era thriller Child 44, London Spy imparts unexpected spin to the espionage genre. Among other things, apart from the title it was by no means clear that it had anything to do with spies for virtually all of the first episode, although the camera did linger suspiciously over the MI6 building on the South Bank at one point. And once, the protagonists spotted a dubious-looking car in their rear-view mirror.However, just before the final credits rolled, we suddenly knew we'd been plunged neck-deep into something exceedingly sinister. Danny (Ben Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There were no shouts of “You’re a genius!” from the Hammersmith crowd last night, as there have been earlier in Newsom’s tour. But there were the shrill gasps of astonishment and adulation you would usually find at a One Direction gig, or during a tense rally at Wimbledon, not from a mature, West London audience attending a recital of harp and song. Live, her voice is fresh, and the accompaniments clearer than on record, which allows the incredible range and ambition of her compositions to stand out.Newsom played mostly from the new album Divers, but there was enough from earlier releases to Read more ...
Marianka Swain
What exactly is the level of Kenneth Branagh’s self-awareness? He’s certainly conscious of inviting comparison with Olivier once again by presenting a year-long season of plays at the refurbished Garrick under the auspices of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company – and by taking on Olivier’s famous title role in The Entertainer. But what should we make of his choice of Rattigan’s backstage company Harlequinade, which blithely skewers an egotistical actor/manager and his rep company’s luvvie excesses?One might read it as Branagh and co-director Rob Ashford’s canny attempt to ward off Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They said there'd never be an audience for a period drama about an aristocratic Edwardian family. Six series later, we're bidding adieu to a national (and indeed global) institution, as Julian Fellowes's motley band of ridiculous, ahistorical and frequently exasperating characters potter off into the fading TV sunset. There's still the Christmas special, but – though we might not admit it – we'll miss them.It was the casting wot dunnit. Some will undoubtedly argue that you can find more plausible characterisations in CBeebies or the new-look Thunderbirds, but despite the non-sequiturs and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Christian Gerhaher is a classy recitalist. His stage manner is debonair, his tailoring immaculate (although his hair can be unruly). His artistry focuses on key vocal virtues: directness of expression and beauty of tone. In this evening’s recital, an adventurous programme that switched between the Classical era and the Modern, that proved as valuable a combination in Schoenberg as it did in Beethoven.There is a husky quality to Gerhaher’s voice, an attractive burr that appears around mezzo-forte and defines all of the louder music that he sings. It is less apparent in quiet music, but even Read more ...
David Nice
Back in 1949, Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera, with its enduring second part The Little Sweep, blazed a trail for children’s opera in Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall. Little has changed about this generously-sized village institute – a funding appeal for much-needed renovations is under way – and Jenni Wake-Walker’s Jubilee Opera is still waving the banner for music education with works that make the right sort of demands. The Drummer Boy of Waterloo, marking the bicentenary of that most famous of battles, is the latest.After Britten, this vital genre didn’t exactly flourish, in the UK at least – Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Jessica Swale’s Thomas Tallis is the first new play commissioned for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – the beginning, hopefully, of the same relationship the Globe itself has always had with new writing. In concept, it’s everything this unique space should be doing, exploiting the Wanamaker’s physical intimacy and its architecture, placing music on an equal footing with drama, celebrating stories from the age of the theatre itself. In practice, however, Thomas Tallis is neither a satisfying play nor a satisfying concert. Stuck somewhere between the two, it never quite works out what it wants to Read more ...