Reviews
Matt Wolf
There's commanding, and then there's Michael Sheen, who sweeps on to the Olivier stage 15 minutes or so into the new National Theatre revival of Under Milk Wood and scoops up the entire production with it. Inheriting a role made to order for this Welshman, Sheen takes to his fellow countryman Dylan Thomas's 1954 classic as if on a date with destiny. Lyndsey Turner's approach to the intrinsically piecemeal material may at times tilt towards the fussy, but Sheen comes at this portrait of small town life like a man possessed and holds the audience in his disheveled, gleaming-eyed grip from the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
She became one of the most successful pop stars in history, but Britney Spears has also become a paradigm of the horrors and pitfalls of life in the white heat of showbusiness. This new documentary by Samantha Stark (made by the New York Times) tracks Britney’s path from her upbringing in the small Bible Belt town of Kentwood, Louisiana through her precocious progress from an 11-year old star of TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club – also featuring Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling and Christina Aguilera – to monster-selling hits like "...Baby One More Time" and "Oops!.. I Did It Again". But then come Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Thirty years on, Alex and Jason meet at a university reunion and cab it back to Jason’s old student house where Alex is thinking “probably…” and Jason is thinking “probably not…” - each, it turns out, with good reason. We look on as the clumsy fumblings of youth get replaced with the anxious fumblings of middle age, two temporal spaces coming together in one room. Deborah Bruce’s new play for the Hampstead Downstairs eschews the opportunity to take potshots at her generation (no “OK boomer” vibe here) and instead treats seriously a collection of issues that will have said boomers Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While recognisably a John Grant album, Boy From Michigan brings on board something new and unprecedented – an outside producer. Welcome, Cate Le Bon. Among her previous production credits are Deerhoof and Tim Presley, whom she’s collaborated with on an album. As these and her own releases attest, she’s not going to steer anyone towards the mainstream.For Grant’s fifth solo set, the follow-up to 2018’s Love Is Magic, Le Bon appears to have helped give Grant his most integrated sound in years, bringing a balance which last surfaced on much of 2013’s second solo album Pale Green Ghosts. Although Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s not easy to sum up Physical in a pithy soundbite, though “quasi-political misanthropic comedy” might be vaguely in the right ballpark. It’s set in San Diego, California in the early Eighties, in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s election to the Presidency, and focuses on a dislikeable married couple, Sheila and Danny Ruben.Their problems might be solvable if they were completely different people, but as it is they have an assortment of mountains to climb. Danny, played by Rory Scovel (pictured below) with an aura of sleaze and moral turpitude which seems to discharge its own specific and Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Rounding out a decade of personal success – beginning with his Cannes Jury Prize-winning The Puppetmaster (1993), followed by a best director award for Good Men, Good Women (1995) – the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien travelled to the Japanese harbour city of Hirado as part of his research for Flowers of Shanghai (1998). An unexpected work, the film emerged out of the ashes of a failed project to shoot a biopic of Zheng Chenggong, otherwise known as Koxinga, a Chinese Ming loyalist who fought against the emergent Qing Dynasty. Set at the close Read more ...
David Nice
A massive musical hope for the future is what we all need right now, after 14 stop/semi-start months and a threatened decimation of the concert and opera scene, the danger of which isn't over yet. This year’s BBC Cardiff Singer of the World delivered that hope in frissons and plenty of tear-inducing moments, even though the live audience in St David’s Hall consisted of only three empathetic judges. Mezzo Jamie Barton was a clear winner in 2013; the next two singers to take the ultimate prize were more controversial (neither was my first choice); this year, any one among a stunning trio out of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
With a third wave of Covid-19 being widely predicted in the media and the UK live music scene still not back on its feet after the last one, audiences must take their gigs however they are served up. Given the news coverage, I admit to having visions of the Hare and Hounds being set up like a school examinations room, but in the event it was not so bad. The crowd for Young Pilgrims' long-delayed album launch of We’re Young Pilgrims found themselves seated in short rows of plastic seats as if to see amateur dramatics in a church hall. Nevertheless, as in the film Footloose, dancing was Read more ...
David Nice
All 15 of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas deserve to be seen and heard live at least once, though not all of them need staging. Veteran director David Pountney’s bold choice for Grange Park Opera actually gives us two, a prologue reworked as music-drama and the action of 15 years later, exclusive subject of the original and final versions of his first opera; for this Russian-opera trainspotter, that leaves only two more to tick off the list – Pan Voyevoda and Servilia (fine music, fusty ancient Roman plot). The dramaturgy of what's known here as Ivan the Terrible is peculiar, the action lopsided, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dungen’s October 2005 appearance on Late Night With Conan O'Brien was incongruous. Here was a Swedish band on an independent label, singing in their native language, playing live on coast-to-coast mainstream US TV. The show’s host making a great play in his intro of trying to pronounce their name compounded the sense that this was a band of outsiders which had been mistakenly invited to the banquet. The frazzled song they played was “Panda”, from their recent third album Ta det lugnt.This wasn’t their first brush with the mainstream. Three years earlier, their also-independently issued second Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
“A tonic to the nation”. That was the hoped-for effect of the Festival of Britain in 1951, and its concrete legacy was the Royal Festival Hall. Seventy years on, it’s fitting that English National Ballet should be the first through its doors, post Covid closure, with the offer of another kind of pick-me-up – a summery, free-spirited, generous ballet gala which has something for everyone. Its umbrella title, Solstice, doesn’t just describe the timing of the 10-night run. It also reflects the warmth and bright positivity of this show.Today, ENB is a very different beast from its first, 1950s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What to make of Jimmy Carr? He’s a fantastic gag writer and experienced stand-up who has made a hugely successful career on television. And yet... as Terribly Funny makes clear, you have to share what he calls his dark and edgy humour - or, as he has it: “Cunts are a key demographic for me” - to find it mirth-making.His gags tend to be one-liners of the set-up, payoff variety, with a few set-up, misdirect, reveal to vary the pace. But when the vast majority are about how women nag, or how unattractive they are beyond a certain age, or are there just for men’s sexual pleasure, or about ghastly Read more ...