Reviews
Kieron Tyler
From beginning to end, B-Sides and Rarities plays through like a regular album; as though it collects a series of tracks recorded where a cohesive release with a flow was the goal. Yet this 14-cut collection is a compilation with its earliest selection from 2005, the year Beach House formed. Its most recent tracks are from the sessions which resulted in the two 2015 albums Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars. It doesn’t matter that the 2005 track , “Rain in Numbers”, is skeletal and of demo quality – it is of a piece with its companions.What this says about Beach House – Victoria Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 25 years since Chris Patten lost his seat as Conservative MP for Bath. The 1992 election was called by an embattled prime minister, bruised by the Maastricht Treaty (remember “the bastards”?). Neil Kinnock had been expected to win, Labour ahead in the polls until the last. Party chairman Patten orchestrated the campaign so perhaps the exigencies of the role left little time to attend to his own constituency. In any event, to those disappointed that the Tory order was not overturned, Patten’s defeat was a cheering moment in a grim night.He felt “sick at the humiliation” but a consolation Read more ...
David Benedict
An enormous amount rides on a musical's opening number. Without explicitly expressing it, a good opener sets tone, mood and style. Take The Lion King, where "Circle of Life" so thrillingly unites music, design and direction that nothing that follows equals it. "Spring", the opener of The Wind in the Willows, repeatedly announces the warmth of the season, and precious little else. Animals dance perkily, but with nothing to dance about, the flatly staged song goes nowhere. Sadder still, the second song, "Messing About in a Boat", compounds the felony, stating the happiness of the title and the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Were ordinary folk to plunder their lives for comedy, most of us would be sadly lacking in any topics worthy of analysis, let alone laughs. But Russell Brand, who every few years appears to reinvent himself – from drug addict to stand-up comic, from sex addict to husband, from anarchist to social campaigner, to name a few reboots – can in no way be described as ordinary.His latest show, Re: Birth, charts his latest progression, this time into parenthood, but thankfully it’s minus any of the self-congratulatory “I changed a nappy, aren’t I super?” material so beloved of lesser comics. Instead Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Grange Park Opera is aiming big. The company is in a new venue, the grounds of West Horsley Place in Surrey, where they have built themselves a spectacular new opera house in less than a year. The building is not yet complete, but is close enough to stage a full summer season, including this new production of Die Walküre, the second opera of Wagner’s Ring cycle. The opera is a major undertaking for any company, but Grange Park has taken it in its stride, presenting an imaginative and intelligent staging, and to high musical standards, not least from the almost uniformly fine cast.It’s a Read more ...
caspar.gomez
It’s a Tweet-age Glastonbury aftermath. It’s monsooning grey outside. The real world’s back, consensus reality fast encroaching. Everything’s moved on, spun to the next thing as we A.D.D. onto Wimbledon, Hard Brexit or whatever. Even my 14-year-old daughter knows the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant (to the riff from White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”) that rolled across this year’s Glastonbury crowds like a steady rumble of perturbed destiny. “Jeremy Corbyn isn’t just Jeremy Corbyn, he’s a thing now,” she explained. And I sort of know what she means.I woke up today with Rag’n’Bone Man’s chorus Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Baby drives like a deranged bullet. Edgar Wright’s “diegetic action-musical” choreographs the bank-heist getaways of angel-faced Baby (Ansel Elgort) as physically exhilarating pure cinema, a rush that’s rare. It’s also pure, adrenalin-pumping rock’n’roll, a combination built into the plot: Baby can only drive so long as his tinnitus-drowning cassette mix-tapes play, giving him the rhythm and focus he needs. Doc (a lugubrious Kevin Spacey) is the boss he owes, who keeps his pedal reluctantly to the metal, never quite reaching the promised last job, and forced to work with increasingly violent Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This sparkling display of some four score watercolours from the first decade of the last century throw an unfamiliar light on the artistry of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the last great swagger portrait painter in the western tradition. None here is a portrait in the conventional sense: rather Sargent is, so to speak, off duty, painting for himself with a glorious spontaneity, a professional on holiday. Among friends, he created images for himself in a medium that needed great skill, lent itself to experimentation, and produced immediate results. This is not a retrospective, concentrating Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“The northern white rhinos are just a symbol of what we do to the natural world,” as one of the contributors to this haunting documentary put it. “We witness them disappearing in front of our eyes.” The programme ended with names of endangered animals jostling for space on the screen, from hawksbill turtles and the South China tiger to whales, orangutans, the red panda and the snow leopard.This story of the 43-year-old rhino Sudan, named after the homeland from which he was whisked away as a baby to be installed in Dvůr Králové zoo in Czechoslovakia (as it then was), was a terrific Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Labels have their uses but they can also be a blight. The works of the Scottish playwright James Bridie – with their regional accents and domestic settings – bear many of the hallmarks of so-called Kitchen Sink drama but didn’t make the canon. Not grimy enough, perhaps, not English enough, and certainly not angry enough. The playwright is better remembered as a founder of Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival.All power to the Finborough then in its campaign to save Bridie’s writing from terminal neglect. Last year saw the first production in 70 years of Dr Angelus, a play Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway so frequently fetes its visiting Brits that it's nice when the honour is repaid. That said, it's difficult to imagine audiences anywhere remaining unmoved by Audra McDonald's occupancy – "performance" seems too mundane a word – of the wrecked glory that was Billie Holiday toward the last months of her life in the Lanie Robertson musical play, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill. A monologue fleshed out with three (excellent) musicians, one of whom doubles as a sounding board of sorts, Lady Day was originally intended to run in London this time last year when pregnancy unexpectedly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Julian Assange’s white hair marks his public persona. To some he’s an unmistakably branded outsider, or a lone white wolf hunting global injustice. Hollywood would cast him as the coolly enigmatic superhero who’s revealed as the supervillain in the last reel. Laura Poitras’ Risk shows him as a slippery character in his own spy film, dying those famous locks brown as he alters his appearance under his adoring mother's gaze, before making a Bourne-like motorbike getaway under the authorities’ noses, to become a cramped citizen of Ecuador.Poitras’ extreme access films several such pivotal Read more ...