sat 14/06/2025

Reviews

Pippin, Charing Cross Theatre review - happy-clappy vibe

If Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1966 was anyone under the age of 25, why couldn’t a teenage student write a musical in 1967? There are plenty of answers to that question of course, none of which stopped the composer Stephen Schwartz, who...

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Beauty Mixed Programme, Royal Ballet review - no dancers? No problem

Crisis-management has always been part of a choreographer’s skillset, but staging a new ballet with two large alternating casts has rarely been fraught with so much risk. It was one hell of a week for Valentino Zucchetti, first soloist at the Royal...

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Wonderful Town, Quick Fantastic, Opera Holland Park review - everybody's swinging it

It’s a wonderful thing to hear a nine-piece Broadway-style band at full pelt, and to see real show dancing – the first time for me, in both cases, since early 2020. Wonderful, too, is this sassiest of 1950s musicals, for which those great lyricists...

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Dunedin Consort, Butt, Wigmore Hall review – bijou Bach

The Edinburgh-based Dunedin Consort are regular visitors to the Wigmore Hall, and their concert on Saturday night was greeting by a full house. In these Covid times, that meant an audience of just 200, but from the applause, they were clearly...

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French Exit review - Michelle Pfeiffer faces mortality

Michelle Pfeiffer all but purrs her way through French Exit, as befits a splendid actress who cut a memorable Catwoman onscreen nearly thirty years ago. Playing a New York grande dame who deals with bankruptcy by decamping with her son Malcolm (...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Yardbirds - Yardbirds

Instability coursed through the Yardbirds in 1966. When their first studio album Yardbirds was issued in July, the band seen on stage was not the one which had made the album. Bassist and in-house producer Paul Samwell-Smith had left between its...

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The Tomorrow War, Amazon Prime - futuristic blockbuster outstays its welcome

Originally designed as a Yuletide widescreen blockbuster, The Tomorrow War belatedly emerges on Amazon’s streaming service, which at least means you can hit the pause button during its immense 140-minute running time whenever you need a leak or a...

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Never to Forget, Spitalfields Festival review – moving musical tributes to lost care and health workers

During early lockdown in 2020 Howard Goodall published an article pondering the role of the composer in a pandemic. His answer was that music has throughout history been successful at memorialising people and events, and that it could do so again....

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Constellations, Vaudeville Theatre review - a starry revival

A cosmologist and a beekeeper walk into a barbecue. Or a wedding. The beekeeper is in a relationship, or married, or just out of a relationship, or married again. The cosmologist shares the secret of the universe with him: it’s impossible to lick...

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Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein's Shadow, Sky Documentaries review - the iniquitous fall of the tycoon's daughter

Last year, Netflix released Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-part documentary about the notorious financier and convicted sex offender. Now, here’s a Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow (Sky Documentaries), a three-parter about the woman accused...

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Hairspray, London Coliseum review - brighter and more welcome than ever

A revival of a multi-award winning musical, with a big star or two, may look like a safe choice to re-open London’s largest theatre, the Coliseum, but there was a tingle of jeopardy in the air, exemplified when the show catches you by surprise...

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Rag‘n’Bone Man, Jazz Café review – powerful first post-lockdown gig

Rory Graham’s first words as he comes on stage are: “Well this is a bit weird, isn't it? It's been a while.” After a run of cancelled gigs, the band haven’t performed live for a year and a half – which feels, says Rory, “a bit like missing a...

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