London
alexandra.coghlan
When Complicite conceived their beautiful A Disappearing Number they gave maths energy, drama, and above all watchability, but they never quite brought the heart. In Simon Stephens’s new adaptation, A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has it in abundance (as well of course as a dead bee, a live rat, three beer cans and 20-odd metres of model train-track). When you can persuade an audience to stay behind after the curtain-call for a mini maths tutorial you’re doing something right; when you can reduce them to tears with it you’re doing something miraculous.Christopher (Luke Read more ...
theartsdesk
Welcome to another show, in which Joe guides us around some of the weirder, smokier corners of the broad church of hip hop, and discussion returns to how far genre can stretch and where originality can reside in a multi-channel, everything-available-at-once world. We also take a listen to more and less authentic sounds of South America courtesy of a Brit-in-Colombia, a Colombian Brit, and a legend of British underground sounds turning Colombian sounds into house music. There's some neo-psychedelia and neo-folk thrown into the mix for good measure.The Colombian Brit is one José Hernando Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We’ve all been there: the persistent sweet-unwrapper during a Beethoven slow movement, the mobile-phone screen glowing at the corner of your field of vision throughout King Lear, the fidgeter who seems to drop their programme every time the music subsides to pianissimo. But where do we draw the (battle) line between ambient noise and outright intrusion? And how, more importantly, should we address these concerns in the heat of the moment?On Sunday night I reviewed half a Proms concert for theartsdesk. The reason I didn’t make the second half wasn’t illness, displeasure at the performance, or Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Formed especially for the London 2012 Festival, the Aldeburgh World Orchestra does what it says on the tin: bringing together talented young musicians from across the world in a single youth orchestra. Under the direction of Mark Elder, musicians from 35 countries, including Jordan, Ukraine, Malaysia and Uzbekistan amongst others, joined together to perform a mixed programme of music from Mahler, Britten and Stravinsky, as well as the world premiere of Charlotte Bray’s At The Speed of Stillness.Owing to circumstances beyond my control I was unable to stay for the second half of the concert. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Unadulterated happiness: swinging on the wheel, high above the ground, at the fair on Hampstead Heath in 1949, in Wolf Suschitzky’s photograph that effortlessly conveys that sense of moving at ease through the sky. Fourteen years earlier the same photographer, just arrived from Vienna, immortalised a gravely courting couple smoking their cigarettes over a tea in Lyons Corner House, the behatted lady apparently entertaining a genteel proposition; and inbetween Suschitzky shows us the view of total devastation in 1942, flattened streets strangely punctuated by arbitrary heaps of rubble, Read more ...
howard.male
It’s perfect timing for the release of this collection of cover versions of London-themed songs by multi-cultural London-based musicians. The big surprise is that some of the tracks could so easily have descended into cheesiness or simply not measured up to the original, yet nearly every band has successfully put a new spin on the song they’ve chosen, in some instances even momentarily blocked the original from memory.The Soothsayers reggaefied “Streets of London” makes you forget Mctell’s maudlin original, Katy Prado & The Mamboleros retain the punk spirit of 77 on their version of the Read more ...
geoff brown
Long before the invention of digital technology and the birth of Keira Knightley, cinema shows in Britain contained not one feature, or two features, but also what the advertisements called a "full supporting programme". That meant newsreels, maybe a cartoon, or what the trade called "interest" films: travelogues and such. Many of those weren’t interesting at all, nor have they become so with age, though that’s not the case with the 12 examples drawn by the BFI National Archive from a travelogue series shot all over London’s highways and byways in 1923/1924. The producer of the series, Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Madonna earned her place in the pop elite many years ago, and there are many reasons for this, which needn't be reduced into a list. Certainly though, a big reason will be the obvious - how much better her fans' lives are with her songs in them. And 65,000 of them turned up in Hyde Park to see the spectacle and dance to the hits. Her latest album MDNA may be a weak, disengaged affair with singles that have failed to chart well, but with a back catalogue like no other, there was a huge expectation that its best moments may be reinvigorated for the live setting - or at least swarmed with Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Let a woman in your life," roars Professor Henry Higgins, “and your serenity is through. She'll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome and then go on to the enthralling task of overhauling you.” It’s a scenario not unlike letting the winsome darling that is musical theatre loose among the club armchairs and smoking jackets of a classical music festival.The dome of the Royal Albert Hall may have been safe from a substantial redesign, but last night the lights glowed hot pink and the stage teemed with more action than a whole cycle of Beethoven symphonies. John Wilson and his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sound the trumpets triumphantly - Matthew Bourne’s most original masterpiece has come out of hiding into full view, a giddy, sexy, diabolical confection that hovers on the edge of hellish, and deserves to become a global smash. Play Without Words is everything that any sex comedy could aspire to, everything that a film noir could aim for, and much more dangerous than either theatre or film can be, because it’s what bodies do, not what mouths say, that is leading you into your own sinful nature.Bourne made the work in a National Theatre workshop 10 years ago, and that experimental milieu drew Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It seems almost a lifetime since Tom Jones was a man in very tight clothes who did well in the clubs of Las Vegas. After the fallow years, his 1988 cover of Prince’s “Kiss” kick-started a tongue-in-cheek rehabilitation period that lasted a decade, right up to the unforgettable “whoowauh!” of “Sex Bomb”. But what happened next surprised everyone. Jones started to relearn his craft. And now, after the last two decidedly post-ironic albums, the question remains, has “Jones the Voice” really become a genuinely credible artist?The organisers of the 2012 Blues Fest series certainly felt so. And Read more ...