Reviews
Thomas H. Green
While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately. Modern classical, often computer-treated, is on the rise, recalling the long ago days when tweedy collectors would have chests of classical to dig into on Sunday afternoons, place on weighty old stereos, and sit quietly, eyes closed, contemplating the eternal verities (well, I knew one older gent who did that, back Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There are great sportsmen, and on top of those there’s a handful of phenomena. Sachin Tendulkar is one of the latter, a cricketer of seemingly limitless gifts who’s ranked among such deities as Viv Richards and Brian Lara. Or even Don Bradman, who pops up in an archive clip in this weighty biopic saying that this bloke Tendulkar bats like he used to.Cricket followers everywhere regard Tendulkar as somewhat miraculous, but in India, he has ascended to an astral plane of adulation. He retired from the game in 2013, having amassed the kind of stats that it will probably be impossible for anybody Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Globe’s artistic director Emma Rice has made no secret of her desire to go out with a bang, in this, the final season of her brutally truncated tenure at the company. With this Twelfth Night she stages a departure with bells (and whistles, and disco-balls, electric guitars, congas, Sister Sledge, and yes, a whole rig of lighting) on – a neon-bright, two-fingered salute to the board that forced her out.The trouble is that, for all its zany energy, its charm and its humour (and there is plenty of each), the show also ends up giving two fingers to Shakespeare, which rather makes the board’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the dog-eat-dog world of White Gold it’s 1983, when greed was about to become good and (as the show’s creator Damon Beesley puts it) “a time when having double-glazed patio doors installed meant you were winning at life”. The streets were full of sludge-coloured cars from British Leyland, and Duran Duran and Bonnie Tyler ruled the charts.Beesley (of Flight of the Conchords and The Inbetweeners fame) served time as an Essex Man in his youth, and this pungently-flavoured opener dripped with closely-observed ambition and ruthless one-upmanship. Our protagonist and narrator Vincent Swan ( Read more ...
David Nice
Men playing boys playing girls, women and men, all female parts convincingly falsettoed and high musical standards as backbone: Sasha Regan's single-sex Gilbert and Sullivan has worked a special magic on Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore and now The Mikado, not so much. Energetic song and dance are still in evidence. But this time a hard-worked scout-camp setting – located, as advance publicity tells us to expect, some time in the heyday of Enid Blyton – brings very little to highlight Gilbert's immortal preoccupations with class and hypothetical sadism.Familiar Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Welcome back, John Boyega. Less than a decade ago, he was an unknown budding British stage actor, then he took off as a global film star thanks to his role as Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens after his debut in Attack the Block, the comedy sci-fi flick. After these extraterrestrial excursions, Boyega is now back to earth, playing the lead at the Old Vic in Georg Büchner’s 1837 classic, Woyzeck, translated this time by Jack Thorne, the playwright who wrote London’s two-part super-hit, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.It’s a radical rewrite. Gone is a lot of the mystery and the poetry of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was a very fine concert indeed, plus a lot more. The first half was a very carefully planned series of unveilings around the theme of Béla Bartók and Hungarian folk music, the second an overwhelming performance of his Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.The evening started with conductor Iván Fischer evoking the crucial incident in Béla Bartók’s life when, newly graduated as pianist and composer, he was mesmerised by the folk singing of Lidi Dósa, a peasant girl from Gerlice. It was that experience which led him to head off to the villages of Hungary and Transylvania with Zoltán Kodály to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We’ve recently seen how Formula One heroes Ayrton Senna, Niki Lauda and James Hunt can become box office gold, in the form of Senna and Rush. Roger Donaldson’s profile of New Zealand race ace Bruce McLaren is more for enthusiasts than a wider public, but for anyone interested in the sport it’s an illuminating portrait of a gifted F1 pioneer who has lapsed somewhat into obscurity since his death in 1970, aged 32.McLaren’s name still adorns the Woking-based team that has produced champions like Senna, Mika Hakkinen and Lewis Hamilton, but today’s technocratic monolith in its Star Trek Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tristan & Yseult has become something of a calling card for Kneehigh, which was founded in 1980 and is now the unofficial National Theatre of Cornwall. Emma Rice, currently artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London, created this production in 2003 with writers Anna Maria Murphy and Carl Grose, and it catapulted the company to national recognition. Here Rice directs a touring revival which is part of the Brighton Festival.The pre-Arthurian legend is a tale of forbidden desires and broken hearts. Tristan (Dominic Marsh) is sent by Cornish King Mark (Mike Shepherd) to Read more ...
peter.quinn
Almost 50 years since he started working on it, and following its world premiere in New York in February, it was a huge thrill to hear Jon Hendricks' lyricisation of the classic Miles Davis-Gil Evans album Miles Ahead at Kings Place.That the vocalese master not only got to finish, but also hear, his labour of love is thanks to a cat's cradle of happy circumstance involving a conversation between Hendricks and Pete Churchill at the Royal Academy of Music in 2010, the doggedness of Churchill in following up his offer to perform the work, the long-term commitment to the music of the incredible Read more ...
james.woodall
This is the most frustrating film. It’s probably no fault of the makers, but it’s rare to have to assess a documentary for what it doesn’t have. Over nearly two hours of celebrating the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Beatles period – late 1966 to their record label Apple taking off in 1968 – there is not a note of the group’s music.Well, alright, in the opening animated credits you detect a phrasal shimmer of George Harrison’s sitar-driven “Within You Without You”, but that’s it. The score, by Andre Barreau and Evan Jolly, is a confection of atmospherics and rhythms that could be the Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
In 2013, NetherRealm Studios, the creative force behind the multi-million-selling Mortal Kombat franchise, got their hands on the DC Comics character roster and created a highly polished game where superheroes were at war with each other. Lois Lane lay dead amongst the ruins of a post-nuclear Metropolis, where broken city streets hosted pitched battles between a tyrannical Superman administration and a Batman-led insurgency. Injustice: Gods Among Us was born; the jaw-dropping visuals combined with intuitive controls and surprising gameplay depth made it a big hit with both hardcore and casual Read more ...