Reviews
theartsdesk
Carole King: The Legendary DemosLisa-Marie Ferla For one whose appreciation of Carole King, the songwriter, has never truly been distinguishable from her appreciation of Carole King, the performer, a listen to the treasure trove that is The Legendary Demos is a curious exercise indeed. Perhaps it’s the presence on this collection of early cuts of six tracks that would later appear on Tapestry, King’s 1971 breakthrough in her own right, but even with the knowledge that many of these recordings were put together as showcases to be pitched to other artists, it is hard to dissociate them from a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Something extraordinary is happening at Shakespeare’s Globe. However unlikely the appeal, audiences are flocking to every one of Globe to Globe’s visiting productions. But sometimes logic surely cannot be defied. A full house for Pericles, and an ecstatic ovation?In contrast to ancient Rome, classical Greece is responsible for the lamer ducks in the canon. By a neat twist – possibly deliberate – they are being staged by companies from Greece itself and the country’s current saviour. The German Timon of Athens arrives in the season’s final week. It fell to the National Theatre of Greece, back Read more ...
graham.rickson
Medtner: Arabesques, Dithyrambs, Elegies and other short piano works Hamish Milne (Hyperion)The title is already intriguing; enough to send you running to the dictionary to find out what a dithyramb is. Nikolai Medtner’s three examples are fun to listen to, the second finishing with a flamboyant coda. Born in Moscow in 1880, poor Medtner eventually pitched up in a Golders Green semi, dying there in 1951. He had his champions – Rachmaninov respected him highly, and Horowitz believed that he was “a wonderful composer”. His music is lyrical, highly melodic and beautifully constructed. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Gerald Barry's new operatic adaptation of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest delivers a number of firsts. The first opera score to contain an ostinato for smashed plates. The first orchestra to include a part for pistols and wellington boots. The first opera (that I know of) to offer the role of an aging mother to a male bass. And the first opera I've been to where I've cried with laughter.Granted: on paper it all sounds a bit Chuckle Brothers. Smashing plates, wellies, travesty roles aren't automatically funny at all. But like all the best jokes, these are not jokes. Barry doesn't Read more ...
David Nice
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, his reprise of Falstaffian humour to please Queen Bess is surely the most specific in its prosaic gallimaufry of earthy English vocabulary. Yet it’s also the most universal in its target-practice at the lecherous, traditionally overbuilt gentleman-hero. So it was easy enough to forego relish of words like "wittol", "frampold" and "drumble", not to mention the choicest fat-man insults, and just enjoy the broader brushstrokes of the fun had by independent-minded Nairobi wives at the expense of Mrisho Mpoto’s jolly Sir John throughout this exuberant production in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery tend to start with a bang and end with a whimper; so to avoid the experience of diminishing returns, I started upstairs – hoping to save the best until last. The stratagem worked perfectly; my final encounter was with 20 portraits by American photographer Katy Grannan, undoubtedly the star of the show, that fill the first gallery to knock-out effect. And on the way down, I came across interesting work that would have seemed second best had I begun on the ground floor with Grannan.Out of Focus does not pretend to be a survey of contemporary photography. Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The opening scene of Whit Stillman’s (The Last Days Of Disco) first film in 13 years comprises one of the most immediately familiar scenarios in the American high school genre. A wide-eyed new girl arrives on campus, is spied by a trio of queen bees and co-opted into their ranks, from where she embarks upon a journey of social self-discovery and inevitable hubristic downfall. But this is college, not high school, and the queen bees are something altogether subtler and stranger.Rather than Mean Girls, these damsels are philanthropists, on a mission to save their fellow students from depression Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Glenn Close always had it in her somehow. That mannish jawline was part of her steel cladding in Fatal Attraction. The lasting image of Dangerous Liaisons comes at the close, when Close’s Madame de Meurteuil scrapes off her painted mask to reveal a hard hatchet face. And then there’s her ruthless lawyer in Damages, not to mention two gruesome helpings of Cruella de Vil. If any of Hollywood’s leading ladies from the past 30 years can get away with strapping up her womanly parts and impersonating a man, it is surely an actress who has often played women who play men at their own game.Albert Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As both a catalyst and a musician, Juan De Marcos Gonalez has had a massive impact on Cuban music in the last couple of decades. He formed the retro group Sierra Maestre 30 years ago, when to resurrect old-style Cuban music was considered decidedly odd; he had a million seller with the first Afro-Cuban All Stars album; and he not only arranged the Buena Vista Social Club but persuaded the great Ibrahim Ferrer and Rueben Gonzalez to come out of retirement for that album, which freakishly sold six or seven million copies. The band’s first appearance on these shores in 1998, with Ferrer on Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Where would America be without its diners? Or for that matter, where would US culture be without them? Now here's another dramatic piece set in America's version of the greasy spoon, a sassily scripted sitcom by Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick King, who created Sex and the City. Whereas SATC was set in Manhattan, 2 Broke Girls is located in New York City's less monied, but nowadays more groovy, borough of Brooklyn.The set-up is very much of our times. Max Black (Kat Dennings) works two jobs to make ends meet: during the daytime, she is nanny to Brangelina, the twins of rich Manhattanites Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The long-threatened Avengers Assemble (in the US simply The Avengers) is an appositely extravagant big screen adaptation of the Marvel comic book sensation. More importantly for many, it’s an amalgam of several superhero film franchises, making it a great excuse to pile star upon star. Written and directed by cult favourite Joss Whedon, it really is a fanboy’s dream. Perhaps you’re relishing the prospect already, but even those for whom it sounds like a load of “crash, bang, wallops” may find themselves pleasantly surprised. Despite a predictably nonsensical plot, Avengers Assemble rises Read more ...
howard.male
Apart from the fact that it’s a razor-sharp piece of writing, what most delights and impresses me about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is how it gets under people’s skin. It has generated several books in fevered opposition to it and, needless to say, countless abusive emails land in the poor man’s inbox every day. If it wasn’t such a lucid, incisive and relentlessly powerful piece of work I doubt it would have got such fierce and sustained opposition.But what poor Richard needs now is not some other despiser of organised religion like myself singing his praises, but a well conceived Read more ...