New York
Midnight Cowboy, Southwark Playhouse - new musical cannot escape the movie's long shadowSunday, 13 April 2025
It seems a bizarre idea. Take a pivotal film in American culture that reset the perception of The Great American Dream at this, obviously, pivotal moment in American culture in which The Great American Dream, for millions, is being literally swiped... Read more... |
Patrick McGilligan: Woody Allen - A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham review - New York storiesWednesday, 09 April 2025
Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Woody Allen weighs in at an eye-popping 800 pages, yet he waits only for the fourth paragraph of his introduction before mentioning the toxic elephant in the room: i.e. the sad fact that, despite never having been... Read more... |
La Cocina review - New York restaurant drama lingers too longWednesday, 26 March 2025
La Cocina is one of those films that cuts an excellent trailer, succinctly delivering just enough characters, plot and visual flair to entice an audience that enjoyed recent dramas set in restaurant kitchens like The Bear, Boiling Point and The Menu... Read more... |
The Alto Knights review - double dose of De Niro doesn't hit the spotFriday, 21 March 2025
The power struggle between New York crime bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello is one of the foundational stories of the American Mafia, though perhaps asking Robert De Niro to play both of them was a trifle over-optimistic. With his track record... Read more... |
Album: Billy Hart Quartet - JustThursday, 20 March 2025
There was a telling remark in Wynton Marsalis’s recent interview with Katty Kay for the BBC show “Influential”. Talking about how jazz functions in real time as a democracy, he said: “Our music requires you to be in balance with other people”,... Read more... |
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Marsalis, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - sounds above substanceMonday, 17 March 2025
Few symphonies lasting over an hour hold the attention (Mahler’s can; even Messiaen’s Turangalîla feels two movements too long). Wynton Marsalis is a great man, but his Fourth, “The Jungle”, is no masterpiece, not even a symphony – a dance suite,... Read more... |
Bach's Mass in B minor, The English Concert, Bezuidenhout, St Martin-in-the-Fields review - solemnity and splendourFriday, 21 February 2025
If not quite his last will and testament, the work now known as Bach’s Mass in B Minor represents a definitive show-reel or sample-book of the Leipzig cantor’s choral and orchestral art. Its complex patchwork of manuscripts dating from different... Read more... |
Saturday Night review - a dizzying 90-minute trip to a landmark TV eventFriday, 31 January 2025
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.To capture the... Read more... |
Catherine Airey: Confessions review - the crossroads we bearTuesday, 28 January 2025
Anglo-Irish author Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, is a puzzle, a game of family secrets played through the generations. Set partly in New York and partly in a small town in Donegal, the book moves back and forth through time and space... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: New York Dolls - Showdown At The MercerSunday, 26 January 2025
“A band you’re gonna like, whether you like it or not.” The proclamation in the press ads for the New York Dolls’ debut album acknowledged they were a hard sell.At this point, in July 1973, the band was a New York phenomenon. There had been an anti-... Read more... |
Babygirl review - would-be steamy drama that only flirts with transgressionThursday, 09 January 2025
Babygirl starts with the sound of sex, piped in over the credits. There's a lot of it on our screens at the moment, from Disclaimer on Apple TV to Anora and Queer at the cinema, much of it noisily explicit. The intimacy co-ordinators must be... Read more... |
Best of 2024: Visual ArtsMonday, 30 December 2024
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate... Read more... |
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