America
The Penguin Jazz Guide: The 1001 Best AlbumsSunday, 07 November 2010
It's a curious fact that, for whole swathes of the music-buying public, their jazz collection has never grown beyond the ubiquitous Kind of Blue. OK, it's a seminal masterpiece which continues to sell like shovels in a snow storm. But why stop there... Read more... |
Due DateWednesday, 03 November 2010
Todd Phillips’s interest in road trips as a hook for 90 minutes of male bad behaviour continues with this virtual remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. For mismatched couple Steve Martin and John Candy, read Robert Downey Jr and Zach... Read more... |
Nearly Ninety, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Barbican TheatreTuesday, 26 October 2010
I’ll retain lifelong, life-changing memories of the joyous mysteries of Merce Cunningham’s dances, so it’s unimportant for me that Nearly Ninety, his final creation before his death last year, won’t be one of them. Naturally his company brought it... Read more... |
Q&A Special: The Late Merce CunninghamTuesday, 26 October 2010
Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly... Read more... |
Red Bud, Royal Court Theatre UpstairsMonday, 25 October 2010
They drink, they swear, they get high, they play air guitar: but it all looks a little sad, and more than a little desperate, when the red-blooded, all-American dudes involved are middle-aged, with the beer guts and the emotional baggage to match.... Read more... |
The Event, Channel 4Saturday, 23 October 2010
Don’t you hate it when you have weeks like the ones poor Sean Walker, played by mini-Tom Cruise Jason Ritter, has been having? You go on a relaxing Caribbean cruise with your bride-to-be Leila (Sarah Roemer), you get friendly with another couple,... Read more... |
Krystle Warren, Rich MixFriday, 22 October 2010
Paradoxically, the greater the number of established artists you find yourself comparing a new talent to, the more original you are eventually forced to conclude this new talent is. So let’s get those comparisons out of the way: this Kansas City gal... Read more... |
Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women, BBC FourThursday, 21 October 2010
The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that... Read more... |
Moombahton, Boombahchero and 21st-century genre meltdownMonday, 18 October 2010
Some days I feel like I've woken up on the other side of some wormhole in the spacetime continuum, and the world is a subtly but definitely different place to yesterday. So it was last week when I got a slightly drunken email from a music... Read more... |
Flashdance The Musical, Shaftesbury TheatreThursday, 14 October 2010
They keep on coming, these screen-to-stage musical adaptations, noisy, bombastic, as unsubtle as juggernauts. The best of them offer up their uncomplicated entertainment with some pizazz; but Flashdance is a particularly vacuous example of the genre... Read more... |
The Country Girl, Apollo TheatreTuesday, 12 October 2010
Many theatregoers will be familiar with Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! which was given a recent revival both in the West End and on Broadway, or film-goers with his screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Some will know his backstage drama... Read more... |
Solomon Burke, c 1940-2010Monday, 11 October 2010He was the man who Jerry Wexler, co-founder of Atlantic Records, thought was the greatest soul singer of them all and "a salesman of epic proportions". Nearly 30 stone when he died, he fathered 21 children (and is reported to have had 90... Read more... |
