1930s
Blithe Spirit review - cloth-eared CowardFriday, 15 January 2021
Noel Coward's 1941 comedy was one of the theatrical casualties of the first lockdown last March in a Richard Eyre-directed West End revival that aimed to mine the pain beneath this play's abundance of bons mots. And now as if to pick up the baton,... Read more... |
Gillam, Hallé, Bloxham, Hallé online review - music of poetryFriday, 15 January 2021
Jonathan Bloxham makes his debut as conductor with the Hallé Orchestra in the third of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts on film. It’s a poetry-connected programme in several respects and features poet laureate Simon Armitage reading both his the... Read more... |
The Seven Deadly Sins, Opera North online review - viscerally thrillingMonday, 23 November 2020
Theatres are currently banned from moving scenery and props about on stage and you might expect this to present a major obstacle to a production of The Seven Deadly Sins. How else is the opera’s protagonist to be seen to visit seven American cities... Read more... |
Rebecca review - mishap at ManderleySaturday, 24 October 2020
When it was announced that Ben Wheatley would be directing a new version of Rebecca, his fans must have wondered what kind of exciting damage he would do to the neo-Gothic template of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel – and how he might spin the... Read more... |
BBC Proms live online: Viennese Night review - sophisticated pleasuresTuesday, 01 September 2020
Viennese operetta is like that other great Central European treat, goulash. It comes in many forms. In Vienna it’s coffeehouse comfort food; in Slovenia they add bacon for a smoky tang. And in the marketplaces of Transylvania it comes in bubbling... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Show Boat (1936)Tuesday, 01 September 2020
Stretching from the 1880s through the 1920s, Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel Show Boat, about three generations of entertainers aboard a Mississippi steamer, became the 1928 Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein musical, a part-musical 1929 film, next the 1936... Read more... |
Perry Mason, Sky Atlantic review - low life and hard times in Depression-era LATuesday, 23 June 2020
Rather like David Suchet’s Poirot, the world will always think of Raymond Burr as the doughty defence lawyer Perry Mason, whom he played in nine TV series and 26 TV movies between 1957 and 1993. But Burr’s Mason existed before the age of the prequel... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Destry Rides AgainTuesday, 19 May 2020
A calculatedly nostalgia-infused town-taming Western, 1939's Destry Rides Again out-sparkled Errol Flynn's contemporaneous light “oaters" and anticipated noir-tinged classics like My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Gunfighter (1950). Because it... Read more... |
Caroline Maclean: Circles and Squares review - adventurous art, progressive living and a good gossipMonday, 11 May 2020
There was a moment in the 1930s when it seemed that contemporary art, as practised in Britain, might join the mainstream of the Western avant-garde. Caroline Maclean makes a lively examination of this uneasy decade, centring mostly on the circle of... Read more... |
Sinatra: All Or Nothing At All, Netflix review - epic two-parter on pop's first superstarThursday, 26 March 2020
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century.... Read more... |
Max Raabe, Palast-Orchester, Cadogan Hall review - escapism with ironyThursday, 05 March 2020
Escapism sometimes feels not just useful but necessary. To be carried back, for an evening, to the world of the 1920s/1930s dance band, with foxtrots, pasodobles, crisp starched collars and secco endings, of slick hair and even slicker arrangements... Read more... |
Cosi fan tutte, English Touring Opera review - a blissful, uncomplicated delightMonday, 02 March 2020
Cosi fan tutte is, as the opera’s subtitle clearly tells us, “A School for Lovers”. But too often these days it can feel like a school for the audience. Joyless productions lecture us sternly on the battle of the sexes – on chauvinism, feminism,... Read more... |
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