Reviews
David Nice
It's time again for surrealist charades at the nothing-doing mansion. Christopher Alden's Handel is back at ENO, making inconsequentiality seem wondrous. Christian Curnyn's conducting sets the tone, with orchestral playing as light as air, and a new cast – with one singer from the previous set switching roles – conceals its art behind what seems like the easiest and most organic of singing and acting.What a relief it is after aimless shenanigans over at the Royal Opera to return to a production that's so sure- (and light-) footed. No one should grumble about the frivolous setting Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
You can just hear Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, the clever-sick Swedes behind Midnight Sun, cackling as they cooked up the pre-title sequence to the first episode of their new series. A grizzled man in a grey suit wakes up to find himself strapped to a helicopter rotor-blade. The engine starts. What follows is enough to give anyone quite a turn.Blood and vomit are everywhere in this curtain-raiser. Rutger Burlin (Peter Stormare), the initial investigator, throws up twice (the human fall-out is disgusting) and his deputy’s daughter yawns in Technicolor all over her daddy, having over-indulged Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Marian devotions have given us some of sacred music’s most striking works, from graceful Ave Marias to anguished settings of the Stabat Mater. Andreas Scholl and musicologist Bernardo Ticci have recently gone in search of some less familiar ones – companion pieces for Vivaldi’s theatrical Stabat Mater, which has long been part of Scholl’s concert repertoire. They have emerged with a rich handful of works from 18th century Naples. Music by Porpora, Vinci and Anfossi makes for a varied, if rather fragmented, evening.While the speaker of the Stabat Mater (set here both by Vivaldi) watches the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dream or nightmare? Bay of Pigs, assassinations, Vietnam, space race, Cold War, civil rights, AIDS, legalised abortions, same-sex marriage, ups, downs and inside outs. From JFK to The Donald in just under 60 years, as seen in 200 prints in all kinds of techniques and sizes by several score American artists (although, shush, a handful are – shock, horror – immigrants).In The American Dream: Pop to the Present we are rushed through the isms from pop to agitprop, Conceptualism and Minimalism to figurative Expressionism and photorealism with a bow to geometric abstraction along the way Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Age is finally catching up with Maurizio Pollini. This recital was one of a series to mark the pianist’s 75th birthday, presenting Beethoven piano sonatas, music at the core of his repertoire. His legendary status was justified by these readings, his usual combination of rich, robust voicing and elegant, craggy lyricism. But the technical problems were too apparent to ignore, especially the uneven passagework and clumsy transitions. Fortunately, though, Pollini’s innate understanding of this repertoire shone through, and the playing improved as it went on, culminating in an "Appasionata" that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Richard Harris's award-winning comedy about a group of seven women and one man who attend a weekly tap-dancing class in a dingy north London church hall ran for three years from 1984 in the West End, from where it went to Broadway. It subsequently became a film starring Liza Minnelli and Julie Walters, and then Harris wrote a musical version which hit the West End in 1997. Director Maria Friedman now revives the dramatic version, with choreography by Tim Jackson.Over the course of several months we get to know this disparate group as they chatter about their work, home and sex lives. We Read more ...
Katie Colombus
This is the comeback after the comeback-that-never-was. It's the anticipated full stage ballet after the hugely popular Youtube video. It's the press waiting to see if ballet's bad boy will do something wild. It's the fans waiting to see if Sergei Polunin really will be the second coming (he's often hailed as the modern day Nureyev). Pamela Anderson is in the audience. The atmosphere at Sadler’s Wells is crackling with a strange air of anticipation.Polunin is infamous for his recreational drug use on and off the stage, his clubbing, scars, tattoos, the dramatic quitting of the Royal Ballet Read more ...
joe.muggs
There comes a point in any experimental music festival when you have to accept the silliness and go with it. And at Borealis, that point comes very early. Only a couple of hours off the plane in Bergen and we're in a pedestrian tunnel under the bus station, where a crowd surrounds Slovakian musician Jonáš Gruska who is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a laptop, directing the whirs, rumbles and cascades of bleeps that are emanating from different sections of the tunnel wall and ceiling. Through all of this, Bergen's Friday evening commuters bustle, variously perplexed and amused, many of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It happened in Monterey, but we’re not entirely sure what yet. Adapted from the novel by Australian writer Liane Moriarty, with the action transplanted from a small town in Oz to the splendid oceanside scenery of Monterey, California, Big Little Lies oozes Hollywood pedigree. It’s co-executive produced by two of its stars, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, and is written and created by David E Kelley (LA Law, Ally McBeal). It looks all set to flare up into a scorching tale of betrayal, jealousy and rivalry between a closely-knit but fatally unstable group of characters.This opening episode Read more ...
Alison Cole
A lovely, scholarly and gently revelatory exhibition, Madonnas and Miracles explores a neglected area of the perennially popular and much-studied Italian Renaissance – the place of piety in the Renaissance home. We are used to admiring the great 15th- and 16th-century gilded altarpieces and religious frescoes of Italian churches, palace chapels and convents, but this exhibition – one of the main outcomes of a generous four- year European funded research project – shows how the laity experienced religion in the context of their everyday domestic lives, as well as during extraordinary Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Michelle Collins, actor and TV presenter, is so strongly associated with her roles in EastEnders and Coronation Street that it is something of a shock to see her live on stage at the Park Theatre, and not behind a bar or in a snug. And although she has always had an energetic versatility, she’s been most comfortable as a chatty Cockney, a quality that Stewart Permutt says attracted him to writing the part of Gina in his engaging new two-hander, A Dark Night in Dalston, specially for her.Set, unsurprisingly, in East London, the story starts as an odd-couple encounter. Gina (Collins), a 49-year Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot. The stars – Emma Watson as Beauty and Dan Stevens as the Beast – have been keen to dismiss any psychology 1.01 readings of this Beauty and the Beast as a presentation of Stockholm syndrome, but the film’s makers, Disney, have been more than keen to trumpet it as having the first openly gay character. Of the latter, more later.So what is it? Well, foremost it’s a wonderfully lavish live action/ Read more ...