America
Jasper Rees
The 2009 Edinburgh Fringe featured a likeable comic duo in pajamas with imaginations as elastic as their faces. The titular garment – spelt the American way after their nationality – suggested both excitable role-play after lights out and those internally logical narratives we visit in our sleep. Their enacted tales of ghouls and freaks, nutters and natterers made only a perfunctionary effort to cohere, but audiences collapsed with laughter and the Pajama Men have now twice taken up residence at the Soho Theatre in London. They’re back again and this time everything has changed – Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“If you’ve got the heart,” sang a suave Ewan Macintyre, “then you can be involved, you can be a part”. There was more heart in the room last night than you’d find in a whole tour of Mumford & Sons. And art. Nothing too flashy to begin, just lovely interwoven mandolins and fiddles, driven by guitar rhythms and their trademark bluegrass banjo. Southern Tenant Folk Union might have been playing in a boozer, but if people call these guys a jumped-up pub band, they've got it all wrong.Southern Tenant Folk Union was formed in 2006 in Edinburgh, by Pat McGarvey, who played a five-string banjo Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As if the education profession wasn't beleaguered enough at present in America, along comes Bad Teacher, the Cameron Diaz vehicle dedicated to the proposition that the only sector of society more deserving of contempt than students is filmgoers. Here's a movie that asks you to believe that the scarily thin Diaz can gorge out on junk food and retain her figure, that a teacher would steal from her student's parents (during Christmas dinner, no less), and that "dry fuck the fuck out of me" is the new "you had me at 'hello'". Not quite.It's been so long since Diaz has made a decent film - The Box Read more ...
David Nice
Acid prophecies of this show’s swift demise, as with that of the great Italian tenor whose supposed transformation from il stupendo to il stifferino results in the debut of a surpise new Otello at the "Cleveland Grand Opera", turn out to be greatly exaggerated. Allora, the tunes and the lyrics aren’t prime cut, but it’s slickly done, strongly cast and contains enough frothy set pieces to earn its salt. And any musical which has stylish fun with both the most electrifying opening of any opera (Verdi's, of course) and the noblest curtain deserves to run and run, in my book at least.Not having Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
What strange goings-on at this year's Spitalfields Music festival. One church is set ablaze by a female laptop trio; another is swamped by 17th-century collectivists; one man opens up a black hole with the back of his guitar; and a harpist becomes a stick insect, taking to his instrument with two bows.
At Spitalfields Church on Monday night, James Weeks and the New London Chamber Choir set about raising our spirits with three early American anthems by William Billings (1746-1800). How vigorous the round Wake Ev'ry Breath felt, as the choir filed in one by one, unleashing the wave upon wave Read more ...
david.cheal
Well, he’s certainly moved on from his log cabin. It’s three years since Justin Vernon’s group, Bon Iver, released For Emma, Forever Ago, the quietly powerful indie-folk album recorded during a bitter winter in his father’s remote Vermont cabin – an album that became almost as famous for the story behind it as it did for its actual music. Now Bon Iver’s palette has been broadened to incorporate instruments such as synths and a glossier, more layered approach to sound; the result is an album that’s sonically rich but seldom really engaging.Part of the problem lies in the fact that Vernon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seasick Steve Wold (b 1941) has achieved widespread popularity over the last five years with his raw, rootsy, blues-flavoured sounds. He's also renowned for his customised guitars, such as one featured on his new album, You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks, that's made from Morris Minor hubcaps, and for his stage patter which combines US Southern charm with hobo lore and anecdotes.Wold left his Californian family home in his early teens after falling out with his stepfather and spent many years hopping freight trains and working as an itinerant labourer. Over the decades he travelled Read more ...
howard.male
Sometimes you hear something new and your perspective on music shifts seismically, making everything you were listening to previously sound safe and predictable by comparison. Inevitably, as one gets older and more musically knowledgeable, such moments are fewer and further between; either the shock of the new isn’t as high-voltage as it used to be, or it just irritates rather than stimulates. And so it was a pleasant surprise when, one morning – heralded by a storm of tape hiss and an enthusiastically bashed tribal drum – a new band called tUnE-yArDs (aka Merrill Garbus) came at me from the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some theatre genres seem indestructible. One of these is the satirical city comedy, for which playwrights dip their pens in poison and spray their venom over the teeming mass of the shallow, the stupid and the successful. When they do this today, they inevitably recall all manner of past plays from Jacobean and Restoration times to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and beyond. In American Trade, a new play from the immensely talented American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, which opened last night, we revisit this familiar territory.Things start well. Pharus, a gay Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
As shoes to fill go, John Wayne’s dusty cowboy boots are about as big as it gets. So when the Coen brothers decided to take their shot at True Grit – the Charles Portis novel that finally won Wayne his Oscar – the world sat back with folded arms to see whether Jeff Bridges could grizzle and swagger his way into the role of one-eyed Rooster Cogburn that Wayne made so completely his own.He does, but that’s rather beside the point; it’s 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld as sternly pigtailed Mattie Ross (“a harpy in trousers”) who carries the film, reinstated to the rightful place of heroine in this Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jerry Seinfeld, acclaimed New York stand-up and star of the eponymous American sitcom co-created with Larry David, last performed in the UK 13 years ago. He’s currently doing a brief European tour and, while keen fans were quick to snap up tickets at the O2 in London, there were noticeably bare areas in the vast arena last night. Lots of British comics have managed to sell out the O2 (some repeatedly), but those unsold seats should come as no surprise; ticket prices started at £75 and went up to an astronomical £300, so the burning question must be - was he worth it?For presentation, a Read more ...
david.cheal
A young outdoorsman is shimmying through a canyon in Utah when a boulder falls and pins him by his arm. He is trapped for 127 hours before he severs the arm with a blunt knife and makes his way out. It’s a compelling scenario, but there are two difficulties that might have presented themselves to any film-maker planning on making the true story of Aaron Ralston’s survival into a movie.First, there’s the Touching the Void problem: we know how it will end (in Touching the Void: he cut the rope! In 127 Hours: he cut the arm!). Whence will the narrative tension derive? And second, it’s a static Read more ...