Reviews
Adam Sweeting
The real-life PT Barnum was a mixture of impresario, hustler and exploiter, and Elvis Presley’s huckstering manager Colonel Tom Parker would surely have viewed him approvingly. However, he also was also a temperance campaigner and a reforming politician who battled against slavery and supported health and educational projects.A pity, then, that the Barnum who emerges – or perhaps fails to emerge – from Michael Gracey’s lavish musical production shows us few of these complex character traits. Played with frantic energy and dentifrice-exhibiting bonhomie by Hugh Jackman, this Barnum is a feel- Read more ...
james.woodall
Live theatre, eh? It had to happen. On press night a sound of what seemed to be snoring (the production’s really not dull) revealed, in the Barbican stalls, a collapse. About an hour in, a huge amount of blood is smeared over Titus Andronicus’s raped and mutilated daughter Lavinia (Hannah Morrish, pictured below with Sean Hart as Demetrius): hands lopped off, tongue cut out. A bearded man three rows behind me was carried by neighbours from his seat to, one hopes, the onward attentions of St John’s Ambulance. This is a peculiar phenomenon. Shakespeare’s sophomoric and not entirely self- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
These are challenging times for new British musicals. Following quickly on from a Pinocchio that ought to be way more joyful than it is, along comes The Grinning Man, a Victor Hugo-inspired musical first seen in autumn 2016 in Bristol. Sharing with its immediate predecessor a thematic interest in the transformative value of pain, Tom Morris's production is a visual delight that needs considerable streamlining and strengthening of tone if it is to amount to more than the musical theatre catch-all that it would seem to be at present.Its literary antecedent (Hugo's 1869 novel L'Homme qui rit) Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Crooked House is being released as a film in various territories, but has already been shown on television in America and has now surfaced as a drama on Channel 5 bearing the title Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. It duly falls in with a recent televisual tradition for serving up the Queen of Crime as a Christmas treat. See also A Witness for the Prosecution and And Then There Were None (which would have been joined by Ordeal by Innocence on Boxing Day until the BBC pulled it on learning that its star Ed Westwick was accused of rape and sexual assault).Adapted from the novel published in 1949 Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Just when you can scarcely move for Messiahs, two Christmas Oratorios came along at once on Saturday night. That’s London concert schedules for you. While John Butt and his Dunedin Consort unwrapped four of the cantatas at the Wigmore Hall, Vladimir Jurowski presented all six. Was it too much of a good thing? You’d never say the same of an incomplete St Matthew Passion – at least, I hope you wouldn’t.What Jurowski uncovered was the degree to which the cantatas hang together as a hexaptych – and the extent to which they don’t. To serve for Christmas in Leipzig in 1733, Bach adapted the music Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always good news when Christopher Biggins announces he's going to don false bosoms again to play a panto Dame, and Aladdin offers lots of frock action in the role of Widow Twankey, Aladdin's washer-woman mum. So hopes were high for this show, which also stars Count Arthur Strong as Emperor Ming.It's a rich tale with colourful locations in downtown Peking and Ancient Egypt, a magic carpet and a cave stuffed with gold and jewels, but Ken Alexander’s production sadly doesn't really sparkle. He's not helped by a weak script by Jonathan Kiley and Alan McHugh, which is noticeably lacking in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This time of year lots of choirs give lots of Christmas concerts that are more or less the same: traditional repertoire perhaps sprinkled with a few novelties. But Tenebrae’s concert on Saturday at Kings Place broke the mould with some imaginative programming, giving us just enough Christmas but no more, and some quite stunning choral singing.Although scheduled as the final concert in the year-long "Cello Unwrapped" series, this was really a choral concert with obbligato cello items and a couple of solo cello numbers. But the occasional presence of the cello was enough to offer a distinctive Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s remarkable how pervasive the Scandi-noir formula has become, with its penchant for weird and perverted killers, labyrinthine plotting and intriguingly flawed protagonists. The French-made Witnesses: A Frozen Death was another fragment chipped off that Nordic iceberg, though it developed its own particular character thanks to strength in depth in the casting and a strong visual signature which fully exploited moody, melancholy locations in northern France.Absorbing as it was, A Frozen Death did little to promote optimism about human nature. There are plenty of miserable real-life stories Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (1812-1888) is a meander, almost day by day, through the long and immensely energetic life of a polymath artist. She builds her narrative on an enormous plethora of primary sources – his marvellous illustrated letters, his limericks and poetry, his hundreds of paintings, prodigious sketches and watercolours, his travel narratives, and the reminiscences, letters and narratives of his contemporaries.These Victorians, tireless travellers, left behind such copious piles of paper that they can practically write their own biographies (at least in terms of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Leonard Bernstein is 100 already. Actually, he’s not – his centenary falls in 2018, but the LSO, an orchestra he conducted many times, is building up to the anniversary with a series of concerts featuring his three symphonies. This performance of the Second completed the cycle, but the concert also showcased another side of Bernstein’s work with Wonderful Town, one of his early Broadway shows. It was cut down to a concert version, but was still an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza, regularly overspilling the packed Barbican stage.The big news in the first half was a rare appearance by the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title Northern Soul's Classiest Rarities Volume 6 suggests this 24-track compilation might be a rag-bag; a collection of random musical floor-sweepings which couldn’t be collected under any other heading. Not a bit of it. Instead, every contribution is a gem. Anyone into soul – Northern, or any of its forms – will get a buzz from this collection.“High-quality dance records from across the Northern Soul spectrum – floor-fillers, chin-strokers, the esoteric and the sometimes obvious” are the words summing up the contents on the back of the package. This nails it though it’s hard to see how Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s impossible to view The Last Jedi independently from its predecessors. It’s the second instalment of the third trilogy of cinema’s greatest space opera. And it’s very much a product of what came before, but not in the way you might expect.After the ambitious but deeply flawed prequels, The Force Awakens traded originality for nostalgia; a plot driven by coincidence and luck, all to serve reassured thrills. With the franchise safely re-established, Disney has now turned to indie auteur Rian Johnson (director of Looper and Brick) to shake things up.Unusually for a Star Wars film, we pick Read more ...