Reviews
Katie Colombus
No one could accuse Nederlands Danse Theater choreographers Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot for thinking inside of the box. And yet that's exactly where they've placed their dancers in the opening piece, Sehnsucht, of this impressive Sadler's Wells program.A couple - Medhi Walerski and Parvaneh Sharafali - dance together, by turns tender and embracing or pained and wistful. As their relationship plays out, so the world spins madly on, which sees the rooms tilting and slowly rotating so that up becomes down. The dancers slide gracefully around the walls, hang off window ledges, sit on chairs Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Women everywhere may start cutting loose in their kitchens after seeing Goddess, a sweet if slight Australian film that suggests a hybrid of Mamma Mia! and Shirley Valentine. Adapted (and greatly expanded) from a solo play written and performed by co-screenwriter Joanna Weinberg, the film's terrain is sure to hit many distaff moviegoers where they live, whether or not they find themselves displaced to Tasmania with a former boyband star (in this case, Ronan Keating) as their often-absent husband. At times too peppy for its own good, the film's abiding virtue is the first leading role onscreen Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre delayed the opening of this play about newspapers for two weeks as it waited for the results of the phone-hacking trial. Is this what a tabloid would call “legal health and safety gone mad” – or what a broadsheet would characterise as “a sensible precaution”? Either way, in the wake of last week’s verdict on former News of the Screws editor Andy Coulson, who was found guilty of phone hacking, Richard Bean’s new play is certainly timely. And it stars the charismatic Billie Piper, who can make a legal dictionary sound interesting.Piper plays Paige Britain (geddit?), Read more ...
Russ Coffey
First there was Hyde Park Calling, then it was Hard Rock Calling and now, re-located in Clapham, it’s just the Calling Festival (presumably the organisers thought Clapham Common Calling carried too many connotations). The venue may have changed but last weekend was, pretty much, business as usual - a couple of stages, watery beer and a two-day smorgasboard of pop and rock. This year, though, all the pop was on day two. Saturday was for real rock.The first day's early-afternoon acts were young guns, who played in the pouring rain to an intense rock-crowd. Midlands- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saturday commuters sprinting for the 17.33 to Ardrossan find themselves dodging an obstacle course of swing-dancing young couples, soundtracked by a pensionable trad jazz band. A shifting crowd of about 100 pause in their journeys at Glasgow Central station to enjoy Penman’s Jazzmen, skilful Scottish veterans comfortable with each other and the demands of this century-old New Orleans music.Four days into 2014’s Glasgow Jazz Festival, its existence will have been news to many of the Glaswegians entertained by this enterprising street gig. More obviously momentous events are signposted around Read more ...
fisun.guner
Well, I’ll be damned if subscriptions don’t shoot up this summer. This lovingly made paean to the New York Review of Books, directed by Martin Scorsese and his long-time documentary collaborator David Tedeschi, was better than any advert, though I’d hesitate – but only briefly – to say that it was one long advert. 95 minutes probably makes it an advertorial feature, like those misleading pages you see in magazines and increasingly newspapers. Still, that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. One’s attention was drawn early on to that famous masthead: the word “Books”, it was pointed out, is Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The National Gallery has a range of personas it adopts for its exhibitions, and for this one, about colour, it has deployed the po-faced, teachy one. The pompous tone is because it’s not just about art this time, there’s science in it, which makes it extra serious. And we know it’s science, because the posters and promotional material look like the cover of a chemistry textbook, with bursts of colour against a black background reminiscent of an explosion in a laboratory, or something exciting in space. In fact, the gallery has adopted the science book look wholesale, with black walls Read more ...
David Nice
There are two avenues down which to approach the well-kept flower beds of Mozart’s early operas. One is to be surprised how rarely the muse of fire which rages through Idomeneo, his first undisputed masterpiece, descends on a work composed just a few years earlier like La finta giardiniera (The Counterfeit Garden Girl), and that’s how I felt sitting through a performance of it for only the second time in my life. The other is to rejoice in the few signs of things to come, the intimations of immortality, which was clearly the thinking behind its selection by Glyndebourne’s new music director Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s presumably just a freak of scheduling that on the night the Rolling Stones threw up the bunting across town, an artist to whom they owe a whole heap of thanks was hosting a party of his own. Bobby Womack was the songsmith who co-supplied the scruffy young covers band with their first number one. “It’s All Over Now” was released by the Stones in July 1964 only a month after The Valentinos’ original version. Not that the song made it onto Womack’s setlist for the first two nights at the Forum. Instead a Sunday congregation was treated to an evening of two contrasting halves, and a pair of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The United States of America: The United States of America – The Columbia RecordingsNothing sounded like The United States of America. The release of their only album in March 1968 must have been greeted with a lot of head scratching. Although at one with the questing spirit of psychedelia, they clearly weren’t brimming with love, peace, gentle vibes and the burgeoning back-to-the-roots movement. Their music incorporated jarring electronics and the deadpan voice of Dorothy Moskowitz, a singer even more dauntingly distant than the Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick.Joseph Byrd was the USA’ Read more ...
Elin Williams
Mametz Wood was the objective of the 38th Welsh Division during the First Battle of the Somme in World War One. Numerous failed attempts to capture the wood were made, during which much Welsh blood was spilt. Mametz therefore holds a great deal of significance for the Welsh and their contribution to the First World War.Welsh writer Owen Sheers attempts to see the battle through the eyes of the soldiers in his poem on Mametz Wood, and now on a farm near Usk in Monmouthshire he has joined forces with National Theatre Wales to bring his poignant, powerful words to life. Drawing on the works of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From Apocalypse Now to Blue Velvet to Speed, as a screen presence Dennis Hopper grew ever more scary. Lately gallery-goers have got to know another side of Hopper via his painting. Now there is a belated run-out for his work as a photographer, although work is maybe the wrong word. He spent much of the Sixties with a camera slung round his neck, but didn’t make a dime from any of his pictures. “They cost me money,” he said, “but kept me alive.” Hopper rode out of the decade on a Harley as director of Easy Rider and he didn’t pick up a camera again. What this trip to the Sixties reveals is a Read more ...