Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
The Mad Hatter gets it about right when he tells Alice: “You’re entirely bonkers… but all the best people are.” Kate Prince takes this line and runs with it in her riotous but surprisingly sweet and often moving hip hop take on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book, a production now enjoying a 10th anniversary revival, coinciding with a revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s three-act Alice ballet in the Covent Garden main house.The premise of Prince’s show, at first, seems bleak: the familiar characters (the Mad Hatter, March Hare, White Rabbit et al) are inmates of an asylum, ruled by a blinkered and cruel Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Later this autumn Richard Eyre’s La Traviata celebrates its 30th birthday. Not bad going for the director’s first ever foray into opera – a genre he admitted holding an “unreasonable prejudice against”.And perhaps that’s the secret to this Royal Opera stalwart – the reliable banker that hasn’t been out of repertoire since its 1994 premiere, whose tightly-laced corsets have been filled, champagne glasses clinked and lace hankies bloodied by some 40 different sopranos. This is a production where liking opera really isn’t a pre-requisite.Bob Crowley’s belle époque designs don’t so much leave you Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes that we associate with sketchy online activity. Instead the woman is doing the kind of amateur sleuthing that anybody with a computer and internet connection can do. Red Rooms' portrayal of an aspect of everyday life that too often feels stilted on the big screen is one of the many things this Quebecois thriller gets right. It Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Like the BBC’s documentary series The Yorkshire Ripper Files before it, the French six-part drama Sambre on BBC Four is more than a grim rerun of an extended crime spree. On trial, too, are the forces that allowed the crimes to continue – here, for an incomprehensible 30 years.Sambre is based on the journalist Alice Géraud’s 2023 book about the case. It’s a mature piece, more drama than documentary, that isn’t concerned with standard crime-mystery twists that slowly ratchet up suspense. Here the man charged with raping 56 women in northeastern France between 1988 and 2018 is clearly Read more ...
James Saynor
Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many of its peers from the “high concept” era.And this absurdly delayed sequel from Burton shows how well the director’s funny bones still click together, as do those of the actors Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, back in harness here – their careers, like Burton’s, revivified in recent years after mid-career dips.Lydia Deetz, Ryder’s ghost-addled Read more ...
Justine Elias
Blame the high cost of city housing, or killer smog. What else can explain a bright young couple’s move from 1970s Leeds to Starve Acre, an isolated, near-derelict farm in rural Yorkshire that has to be the spookiest back-to-the-land setting since The Wicker Man.The husband, brainy Richard (Matt Smith), teaches archaeology at a nearby university; the wife, shy, ethereal Juliette (Morfydd Clark, pictured below), manages the farm. Ttheir son, little asthmatic Owen (Arthur Shaw), is just plain weird, claiming that a spirit, "Jack Grey", whistles to him at night. Richard, a man of science, Read more ...
David Nice
The Proms’ Indian summer of big visiting orchestras is over – and what a parade it’s been – but renewal hit on the last Saturday before the Last Night with a rainbow of choral concerts, from the 26 voices of The Sixteen (yes, counter-intuitive, I know) and the 33 of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers to 250 from six choirs as crisp as a small ensemble under John Butt in a Messiah with a difference.Parry’s “I Was Glad” made sense as the beginning of the end, in a good way (though with some rather bizarre organ stops pulled out by Simon Johnson). It was always the choice for my church choir’s last Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it takes seconds to discern that Juniore are French, a core inspiration appears to be the echoing surf-pop instrumentals of Californian studio band The Marketts, whose 1963 single "Out of Limits" became their most well-known track. Add in – exemplified by Trois, Deux, Un’s fifth and sixth tracks “Amour fou” and “Grand voyageur” – the languid atmosphere of the early Françoise Hardy and the result is a form of Gallic retro-futurist garage-pop.Juniore are a Paris-based three piece and Trois, Deux, Un is their third album. There is more to this musical bricolage than the two most evident Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the March 1969 UK release of the “Return of Django” single, prospective performers of the song could buy it transcribed as sheet music. On the record, the credit was “Upsetters.” For the sheet music, with its photo of a single person, the credit was “Lee Perry, leader of The Upsetters” (pictured below left). Close to a year on from becoming an independent operator, Perry was already singled-out as the music’s principal aspect. A Phil Spector analogue.Of course, in Perry’s native Jamaica, the sound-system circuit meant those at the controls were as much a focus – and sometimes more so – Read more ...
David Nice
Mahler’s Sixth is one of those apocalyptic megaliths that shouldn’t be approached too often by audiences or conductors. It’s been a constant in Simon Rattle’s treasury since 1989, when he first recorded it with his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (they performed it together at the Proms in 1995) to now, when the second of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra concerts followed a recording. Sophisticated, yes, but where was the feral intensity?Perhaps we've just now been spoiled at the Proms by two conductors who seem so mesmerisingly immersed in every moment. Rattle's Mahler no longer Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s exactly a year since Ballet Nights, the self-styled taster platform for dance, started offering chirpily compered evenings of ballet and contemporary at venues where you'd least expect to find them. A first anniversary is already an achievement; to have arrived there bigger and better more so.Typically, Ballet Nights’ sixth iteration was a one-off, but it was also a sell-out, at its largest venue yet, the 950-seat Cadogan Hall, home of the Royal Philharmonic. The hall has its own Steinway concert grand, which must have been a major draw for Ballet Nights founder, artistic director and MC Read more ...
David Nice
The ancient Greeks would probably have liked a lot about Charlie Covell‘s manipulation of mythic material. After all, Euripides was prepared to have a laugh about the notion of Helen whisked off to Egypt while a phantom version wrought havoc in Troy. Helen doesn’t figure in this mostly modern-dress gods-vs-humans drama, but so many other legendary figures do, as well as several you probably won’t have heard of.There’s some focus, but only up to a point, and the diverse playlist of music tracks isn't as smart as it thinks it is. The mythic rule of three gives us a tacky, supersaturated Olympus Read more ...