London
Rachel Halliburton
This witty street-smart play about a white-skinned boy born to a mixed-race mother deploys its narrative with the dexterity of a dance. Two performers move backwards and forwards across the stage, switching through different characters, skin colours, genders and generations, as they tell a story of pride, poverty, passion and prejudice.We’re in Camden as the play starts, where it’s, “Really fucking hot. That inside-an-oven hot you only get in a big concrete city.” Playwright and performer Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s vivid humorous language ambushes you from the outset. A police officer from the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It’s a rare thing that musicians sound better live than they do on Spotify. But Florence Welch sings a note perfect set – even when jumping up and down like a pogo stick, whirling and spinning, or sprinting along the front of the stage to meet fans.Shining with androgynous, enigmatic beauty, she opens with the dramatic “June”, the line “hold on to each other” sung with gravitas as she stands on a tree-cloaked stage beneath the open sky. It’s a message that resonates from the onset – you can feel it, the connection with her hometown audience – the same way Flo seems to be feeling the crowd Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Since 2005 Londinium has carved out a niche in the London choral scene as a purveyor of creative programming, exploring often neglected musical byways or making surprising connections and juxtapositions. Last night the idea was a musical Grand Tour of Europe, as taken by aristocratic young men in the 18th century, and a well-crafted and very satisfying concert resulted.As conductor Andrew Griffiths explained, since there is a dearth of a cappella choral music from the relevant period, they had permitted their imaginary traveller a Tardis, so that although the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You do like to have your cake and eat it, Vity. So many cakes, so many,” laments Harold Nicholson (Rupert Penry-Jones) to his wife Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) as she embarks on an affair with Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki).The Bloomsberries have been parodied so often – I kept thinking here that I was watching a version of Radio 4’s Gloomsbury, with Miriam Margolyes as Vera Sackcloth-Vest – that it’s hard to take director Chanya Button’s interpretation seriously.It constantly verges on pastiche, with everyone rolling their r's in a verry 1920s upper-class way and Virginia, when Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Janelle Monae says her show is all about making memories. She tells the crowd: “I hope that I can become a memory for you that you access when you’re feeling down – a memory that’s rooted in love and freedom.”Themes of #loveislove, courage to live your reality even if outside of the norm, and speaking truth to power are loud and proud in Dirty Computer – the album Janelle is touring Europe, with the London leg coming hot on the heels of a Glastonbury appearance.Her energy isn’t diminished as she takes to the stage in variations of a monochrome unitard, PVC cap and floor length coat, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s no rest for the webbed wonder in Spiderman: Far from Home. It’s just a few months since Marvel wiped out Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame and his protégé Peter Parker is being hounded to fill Tony Stark’s place. Iron Man didn’t give the teenager his high-tech Spidey suit just for him to stuff it in the back of the wardrobe and get on with being a normal teenager, not when the planet is in danger (again). Tom Holland, so endearing in 2017’s Spiderman: Homecoming, is a little overwhelmed by the responsibilities thrust upon him. The young British actor is adept at Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The festival Summer Music in City Churches is in only its second year, filling a gap left by the demise of the long-running City of London Festival. This year’s festival had the theme of Words and Music and offered an enticing programme of recitals, talks and walks, focusing on English music through the ages, and finding enterprising ways of combining solo performers with resident ensembles the London Mozart Players and the City of London Choir. The closing concert showcased works inspired by Shakespeare plays, presenting them alongside Shakespeare’s words, spoken by actor Tama Matheson.The Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I remember my first time in San Francisco, February 1982, crying at the sight of Golden Gate Bridge. I still shed a tear – it and the Bay are so very beautiful and the city is, like Venice, crazy-wonderful, defying all logic. It’s impossible to set foot “in the city by the Bay” without Tony Bennett’s song lodging in your brain; impossible, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, not to hear the song without picturing that magical city. It takes only a couple of notes of that celebrated and evocative piano riff...The man who inhabits the song and sings it from every stage is 93 in just a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" can be heard pulsating through the Old Vic auditorium as the curtain rises on its wondrous revival of Present Laughter: a decisive feather in the cap of artistic director Matthew Warchus's regime. But all Garry Essendine, the vainglorious actor at the whirling centre of Noël Coward's 1942 play, really wants is to make it through the day (and night) intact. Possessing 18 dressing gowns but at odds with that ever-elusive entity known as happiness, Garry has men and women alike in thrall, and so – and how! – does its stratospherically gifted Read more ...
Liz Thomson
While Elton John was picking up another bauble and tinkling the ivories in Paris, the world’s other Piano Man was heading to London and Wembley, where he last played three years ago. It was Billy Joel’s only British gig in a stadium tour that kicked off in Orlando in January and which saw him recently notch up his one-hundredth Madison Square Garden concert – as artist-in-residence he’s been playing one concert a month there since 2014. The boy from the Bronx done good and no mistake.Two Piano Men – "two gifted, idiosyncratic artists who exist... between pop and rock, where Broadway show Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“You want heavy?” Metallica frontman James Hetfield already knows the answer to that question, and he and his three fellow horsemen of the apocalypse certainly deliver that tonight. This stop on Metallica’s mammoth Worldwired tour is the second of only two UK dates this year – they played an extremely rainy Manchester a few days ago – and they are very pleased to be back. A Metallica show always begins with Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold”, from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, so when the lights go down and those unmistakeable notes ring out, the crowd goes nuts before being Read more ...
joe.muggs
Nineteen years, seven albums and untold side projects into their career, Hot Chip have for the first time enlisted outside producers: Rodaidh McDonald and French disco/house don Philippe Zdar. And it's worked. Over the course of the previous albums, the band had steadily evolved from ramshackle and rather self-consciously quirky writers and players to a far slicker operation. Notably this was informed by Alexis Taylor's broadening as a songwriter through various experiments and collaborations, and Joe Goddard's deep immersion in bittersweet deep house music, both solo and in 2 Bears – but the Read more ...