America
James Saynor
“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps why not everyone in Hollywood has agreed with the hotcake thing. Queasy marketeers have often underestimated the likely box office of mad-killer pics – from Psycho (1960) through The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and then on to Todd Phillips’s Joker, which was also seen as a bit of a gamble by its studio in 2019.The Warner Bros sequel to that Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s hard to work out why Kwame-Kwei Armah chose to end his tenure at the Young Vic by directing this soggy musical by Elvis Costello (songs/lyrics) and the American playwright Sarah Ruhl (book). Was it because of it seemed to be a warning about the dangers of populism? Such warnings are always welcome, but this isn’t the piece to do that. In its original form it was a punchy Elia Kazan film that in 1957 launched the career of future sitcom star, Andy Griffith. HIs TV show was a byword for down-home values and folksy wisdom, but In Kazan’s film he had played an Arkansas drifter, Larry “ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“What happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?” aristocrat-architect Cesar Catalin (Adam Driver) is asked. “I’ll apologise,” he smirks. Francis Ford Coppola’s forty years in the making, self-financed epic is studded with such self-implicating bravado, including a wish to “escape into the ranks of the insane” rather than accept conventional thinking, as if at 85 he is not only Cesar but Kurtz, plunging chaotically upriver again, inviting career termination.Coppola subtitles Megalopolis “a fable”, and its tale of an imperious architect fighting venal New Rome’s Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The clue is in the title – not Then in America or Over There in America or even a more apposite, if more misleading, Now in America, but an urgent, pin you to the wall and stick a finger in your face, Here in America.Pre-Trump 2.0, David Edgar’s new play tells us (at least twice, Edgar not shy of driving home a point) that we can learn from past trauma in order to guide current behaviour. So, 300 million+ Americans are to draw on Stanislavski's Method in the polling booths come November?The memories Edgar conjures are from the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee went Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have contracted further, zealously policed by Left and Right dreams of moral perfection.Filmed over eight years, Zwigoff shows the Philadelphia housing project where the Crumb family lived an outwardly respectable, privately maniacal post-war life, and Robert sketching the late 20th century streets of San Francisco, site of his early triumph with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Miranda Lambert is one of those country stars who’s massive in the States but no-one’s heard of this side of the Atlantic. Famous since her early twenties, she’s had a quarter century career, encompassing seven Top Five US albums, including one chart-topper, as well as parallel success as part of trio Pistol Annies. But the most she’s troubled the British album charts is reaching No.52 a decade ago. This is a shame as she’s talented and sassy and her new album is a treat.Lambert’s songwriting chops derive from the best country traditions of storytelling, southern wit and chewy wordage, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British theatre has a proud heritage of science plays. From 1990s classics such as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) to more recent examples such as Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes (2017) and Marek Horn’s Octopolis (2023), the trick lies in balancing intellectual material about often complex scientific subjects with dramatic flair.As the Hampstead Theatre stages Stella Feehily’s new play, The Lightest Element, which was originally commissioned by the Manhattan Theatre Club, the question of how to entertain as well as inform gets a contemporary twist as the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lighters at the ready, because here comes the flood. Drawn from 16-track tape, 1/4in reels and lo-fi sound board cassettes that are now a half century old, the 27 CDs of 431 performances, 417 of them previously unreleased, of Dylan and The Band’s 1974 arena tour of the US, is a set that challenges the listeners’ staying power perhaps more than it celebrates an epochal tour.Sure, the 1974 tour was an important milestone in the Dylan story, and a coda, of sorts, to the story of The Band and Dylan’s trajectory away from the turbulent zenith of 1966. They were like two stage sets colliding: Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is an expensively-dressed fable about a lavish wedding in Nantucket, the desirable island paradise off Cape Cod, which on this evidence is an enclave of conspicuous wealth and gross moral turpitude. The tale is an Americanised version of the good old country house mystery, and behind the superficial veneer of fabulous homes and expensive boats lurks a hinterland of avarice and cruel intentions.At the core of the action is best-selling novelist and matriarch Greer Garrison Winbury, played by an imperious Nicole Kidman with maximum Read more ...
James Saynor
Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many of its peers from the “high concept” era.And this absurdly delayed sequel from Burton shows how well the director’s funny bones still click together, as do those of the actors Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, back in harness here – their careers, like Burton’s, revivified in recent years after mid-career dips.Lydia Deetz, Ryder’s ghost-addled Read more ...
Gary Naylor
One of the Finborough Theatre’s Artistic Director, Neil McPherson’s, gifts is an uncanny ability to find long-forgotten plays that work, right here, right now. He’s struck gold again with The Silver Cord, presenting its first London production for over 95 years. Carla Joy Evans’ beautifully observed costumes set the tone. The styling is just so for upper middle class New England in the 1920s, a touch of Paris (Paul Poiret gets a namecheck), a cloche hat and shoes to die for darling. Once I stopped ogling the cloth (the weight of which reflects the personalities wearing it) and the cuts, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The signs in the Peacock’s foyer warn that this show features "very loud music”. Exactly what Janis Joplin fans want to hear. This is an evening for them, more a concert than a piece of musical theatre.As a gig-musical, it is a five-star belter, with more talent onstage than is decent. Not just the singer who plays Janis, Mary Bridget Davies (Sharon Sexton will cover at some performances) but a trio of backing singers, dubbed the Joplinaires, who are the spit of singers from the glory days of this tribe in every move, sway and sashay. They are also called upon to pay tribute to the musical Read more ...