Reviews
David Nice
Maybe it's a truism that most instrumental music, at least before World War One, aspires to the condition of song. Few have gone farther in that respect than the composers of the three purely orchestral works in last night's Prom. Add to the mix a conductor of impeccable operatic credentials who knows how to draw intimate vocalising from his players, a promising lyric-dramatic pianist and one of the most unusual great soprano voices of our time, and an evening of singing heartbreak was the result.It must have been difficult to know which of these private worlds to throw to the Albert Hall Read more ...
Matt Wolf
At the same time, those of a certain generation will be curious to see Jonah Hill breaking free from the Judd Apatow stable, playing the overgrown kid, 21-year-old Cyrus, of the title. But outshining both the fellas is Marisa Tomei, who completes the film's sexual and emotional geometry with charm and flair. I know she won her My Cousin Vinny Oscar nearly 20 years ago (hard to believe!), but Tomei's getting better as she gets older, as The Wrestler, her ongoing New York theatre work, and now Cyrus prove. Indeed, as was true of a ravishing performance opposite Mickey Rourke that was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be deliberately pretentious, because the secret of Mad Men’s addictive draw is the human profundity you try to read into this fascinatingly surfaced drama about an empty man who doesn’t know who he is. This is the ultimate advert for TV, a series so slick and so moreish you don’t even know it’s an advert.If you are already hooked on Mad Men, you don’t Read more ...
howard.male
The video for this Kansas fantasist’s new single shows Monáe in harshly lit close-up singing the adrenalin-charged “Cold War” directly to camera. But then halfway through the song her concentration goes and she starts laughing and then crying, leaving one wondering what the thinking was behind its release. Perhaps this “artist and business woman” (as she describes herself) deduced that such a curiosity would get people talking and therefore watching - and she was right: it’s had over a quarter of a million hits so far.Or perhaps she just thought it was time to augment her cold robotic persona Read more ...
fisun.guner
To mark Pope Benedict’s controversial visit to Britain next week, the V&A have mounted an exhibition devoted to four of the 10 tapestries Raphael designed for the Sistine Chapel – the first time they’ve ever been seen in this country. Depicting the Acts of St Peter and St Paul, these bright, vivid works were made to hang on the lower walls of the Vatican’s principal chapel, below the older Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoBut even Raphael never saw the tapestries and his full-scale designs for them together: until now, they have never occupied the same space. Commissioned by Pope Leo X in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A drop of menstrual blood spatters the ground in the opening shot of The Runaways, an insolent enough metaphor for the unstaunchable female energy that drives writer-director Floria Sigismondi’s bracing biopic of the pioneering all-girl teenage 1970s rock band until it heads up a narrative cul-de-sac. The blood is leaked by future lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), experiencing her first period while scampering to a club with her less innocent twin sister Marie (Riley Keough), who’ll soon be left in the slipstream of Cherie’s fame to become a drudge. The evening later finds them Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was one of those moments that every conductor (and orchestra) dreads: “The Procession of the Sage” from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is in rip-roaring full cry, percussion grinding and scratching, high trumpet screeching – but Daniele Gatti, it would seem, loses a bar somewhere and gives his Orchestre National de France a premature cut-off, leaving the entire brass section between a rock and a hard place. Stop or play on? An ignominious collapse ensues – as big a blunder as I’ve heard in any professional concert in years. Who says The Rite of Spring no longer has the capacity to shock? Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
For hundreds of thousands of people watching Shane Meadows’s TV debut last night, an updating (by three years) of the director’s skinhead movie, This is England (2006), the opening episode may well have been their first experience of a "Shane Meadows film". What will they have made of it? Because I’m not sure whether it was exactly a Shane Meadows film, or whether it was a Shane Meadows pastiche or a Shane Meadows homage - "in the style of". For last night’s episode was co-written with Skins regular Jack Thorne and directed by someone else completely, Tom Harper (The Scouting Book for Boys). Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Every time I go to Sadler’s Wells now I come out wondering if there’s something wrong with my hearing, so loud and numbing are their speakers. It’s a blight on a lot of shows, but on none more so than Shoes, because this is the first major London production written by that celebrated musical witsmith Mr Richard Thomas since his Jerry Springer, The Opera, and last night I missed probably half the words that I’m guessing should be the chief merit.So is it fair for me to say how disappointed I am by the production? You may have a better acoustic seat. On the other hand, I’m guessing that a lot Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a rather difficult task to describe anything that occurs in Ira Levin’s marvellous old warhorse of a comedy thriller as it contains so many twists, turns, bluffs, double bluffs, triple - even quadruple - bluffs that any description of the plot holds for only a few minutes of stage time. Added to which, nobody and nothing is exactly what they first appear to be.All of which makes Deathtrap a superb evening in the theatre in Matthew Warchus’s engaging revival, even if you know the plot from the 1982 film version with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, or saw one of the 1,793 performances Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Shea Seger is a woman with a story. A story of a career interrupted. At the age of 20, the fragile and slightly dangerous-looking blonde from Texas came over here and made a record which sent ripples across the pond of the Americana scene. Shortly after, her father became crippled after a botched operation on an old Vietnam injury and she returned to Texas to care for him. During those 10 years she also brought up a little girl, Luna, and lived in a trailer. Now she’s back in the UK; and she’s pumped all the frustration, disappointments and anger from that decade into a new record, simply Read more ...
fisun.guner
Apart from a few nips and tucks, age has not withered Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Anyone who can remember the original steamy adaptation of Andrea Newman’s fine novel will recognise the changes. Prue, no longer the manipulative cow who graced our screens back in 1976, has been made-over as an unworldly innocent, while husband Gavin – still a deeply unpleasant wife-beater - is now a chippy, working-class Yorkshireman rather than a chippy American. And Peter, the daughter-obsessed patriarch, appears to be an altogether more anguished soul - though one suspects this has more to do with Trevor Eve’s Read more ...