Reviews
Kieron Tyler
In 1942, Roy Acuff set up Acuff-Rose Music in partnership with Nashville-based songwriter and talent scout Fred Rose. The new publishing company was dedicated to treating songwriters decently. They would not be cheated out of their copyrights. There would be clear and honest accounting. The contracts offered would have better percentages than rival publishers. There would be no shady deals. Acuff-Rose cocked a snook at the country music establishment and, in time, had writers as important as The Everly Brothers, Lefty Frizzell, Don Gibson and Roy Orbison on its books. Acuff and Rose had Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a passage in Martin Crimp’s impeccable libretto for Written on Skin that describes a page of illuminated manuscript. The ink, he tells us, stays forever wet – alive with moist, fleshy, indecent human reality rather than dried into decorous fixity. As a metaphor for storytelling, it’s potent; as a description of George Benjamin’s score, it’s close to literal. Nearly five years after its Aix premiere, the music of Written on Skin still shifts and shudders with awkward emotional truths, buckling with characters who refuse to be pinned in place, hunching with musical tension that refuses Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
"Oh what a beautiful morning! Oh what a beautiful day!" Curly the cowboy sang in the opening scene of Oklahoma!, the first musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943). In the midst of war here was sheer optimism and celebration set – with some nods at reality ("there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, an’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up the sky") – in the American West. It was also a fully integrated show – music, book, lyrics, choreography (Agnes de Mille, Cecil B DeMille’s niece) and set design with everything pushing the narrative, another Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is an event at the heart of Manchester by the Sea that cannot be spoken about, either here or by any character who is a witness to it. But it explains why Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) has withdrawn into a state of catatonic frigidity. He is so cut off from the world around him he can barely persuade a muscle on his face to twitch. Only if he sinks enough beers is he roused to start thumping people in bars before returning to his dingy one-room apartment. We’re a long way from La La Land, this week’s other five-star movie out in time for the Oscars.Lee is not entirely incapable of action Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You could call it the Corbynisation of new writing. In the past couple of years, a series of plays have plumbed the lower depths, looking at the subject of good people trapped in zero-hour contracts and terrible working conditions. Like Ken Loach’s dreary film, I, Daniel Blake, these plays have integrity, but very little dramatic content. Market leaders of this new fashion are two plays devised under the direction of Alexander Zeldin, Beyond Caring and Love. And the latest addition to this catalogue is Katherine Soper’s Wish List, winner of the 2015 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, co- Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Birmingham audiences are a supportive bunch. There was never much likelihood that they’d greet Andris Nelsons’s first Birmingham appearance since he departed for Boston in 2015 with less than the same warmth that they keep for other former CBSO music directors. Even so, he must have been gratified to walk out to a capacity audience – for a programme of Bruckner and Maxwell Davies – and a 30-second ovation, complete with a couple of cheers, before he’d given so much as a downbeat.Of course, the CBSO has already embarked on a whole new adventure, and with an artist as exciting as Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In the annals of ballet directors, always searching for the perfect balance between heritage programming and new work, there can rarely have been a double whammy so successful. In pairing a brand new Akram Khan Giselle with Mary Skeaping's near-perfect 1971 production in one season, English National Ballet may be setting an Orwellian future against a Romantic past, contemporary dance against the most classical ballet, but they have no jarring contrast on their hands. On the contrary, these two very fine pieces of work illuminate one another, and stand proud on their own.For the true ballet Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s the ghastly scenario of a grim morality play. A man called Simon comes into hospital for the removal of a tumour in his oesophagus and the construction of a new food pipe. But there are not enough berths in the intensive therapy unit to ensure he can have post-operative care. Why? Because elsewhere in the country Janice has ruptured her aorta in a car accident. She is on her way to the London hospital which specialises in such cases. If she dies in the ambulance on the way, Simon can have his op. If not, he has to go home (for the second time). How does that make Simon feel? "Guilty, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The aura of Ben Affleck burneth bright. It only seems about 10 minutes ago that he starred in The Accountant, and now here’s Live by Night, his fourth outing as director, and the second movie on which he’s been writer, director and star. He’ll be performing that multitasking feat again on the forthcoming solo-Batman flick The Batman, when he’s not putting in guest appearances in all the “DC extended universe” franchise spin-offs.If a gangster movie could ever be described as a “romp”, Live by Night would be that film, as it vaults across the Prohibition years of the Twenties and Thirties Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves the bloody recent history of Afghanistan with a gripping family saga. Its treatment of racism and radicalism is timely. Other themes too might have been hand-picked for classroom discussion: bullying, betrayal, bad parenting, family secrets. Its first-person narrative makes it feel real.The trouble with this stage adaptation newly arrived in the West End is that only a small portion of the audience is using it for exam revision. Those merely hoping for a theatre Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The timing of Gavin Turk’s retrospective couldn’t be better. Last November Joe Corre, son of punk icons Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, burned his collection of punk memorabilia in protest at the way the 40th anniversary of punk had become an excuse to institutionalise the movement and transform its anarchic spirit into a marketing opportunity. Having started life as deliberately offensive schmatters, the stuff he destroyed had attained a market value of £5 million. Two weeks later, a blue plaque was erected in Marylebone at 33 Daventry Street, the site of a squat where The Clash Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An increasingly fractious America could take a leaf from the ravishing opening sequence of La La Land. A cross-section of drivers caught in LA freeway gridlock forsake their vehicles to become a dizzyingly frolicsome community that look capable of leaping their way to the stars. Road rage and rancour? Not for a second, just a shared belief in the buoyancy that happens when your body simply needs to dance. That overriding vivacity proves an apt point of departure for Damien Chazelle's film, which cleaned up at Sunday night's Golden Globes (seven awards in all) and is poised to do the same Read more ...