America
Sam Marlowe
They keep on coming, these screen-to-stage musical adaptations, noisy, bombastic, as unsubtle as juggernauts. The best of them offer up their uncomplicated entertainment with some pizazz; but Flashdance is a particularly vacuous example of the genre. You probably had to be female, and teetering on the edge of your teens, to enjoy Adrian Lyne’s critically derided film back in 1983 (I freely admit that I was, and I did): Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas’s screenplay is both shapeless and pointless. This new version, written by Hedley and Robert Cary and directed by Nikolai Foster, does nothing to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Many theatregoers will be familiar with Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! which was given a recent revival both in the West End and on Broadway, or film-goers with his screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Some will know his backstage drama The Country Girl (written in 1950) from the 1954 film version starring Grace Kelly, playing opposite Bing Crosby and William Holden, for which she won an Oscar.The Country Girl hasn’t had a major London revival for nearly 30 years. Back then it starred Martin Shaw as the cocky young director Bernie Dodd and now in this slick production he plays the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
He was the man who Jerry Wexler, co-founder of Atlantic Records, thought was the greatest soul singer of them all and "a salesman of epic proportions". Nearly 30 stone when he died, he fathered 21 children (and is reported to have had 90 grandchildren). He was born in Philadelphia in 1936, 1938 or 1940 according to differing reports and made his mark as a preacher before becoming a song-writer and performer. He also had a job as an undertaker and ran a mortuary business in Los Angeles having worked in his uncle's funeral parlour, and was a gospel radio DJ.Among his classic songs were " Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We are in Brooklyn in 1938 and Sylvia Gellburg, a middle-class Jewish housewife, is paralysed from the waist down. It’s a hysterical paralysis brought on by the shock of seeing newspaper pictures of the cruelty meted out to German Jews during the horrors of Kristallnacht (or the night of broken glass). She becomes obsessed with a picture of two elderly Jews forced to clean the pavement with toothbrushes - events several thousand miles away have caused the sudden numbing of her limbs. Or is it something else?In Arthur Miller’s play (written in 1994), Sylvia (Lucy Cohu) is married to Phillip ( Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The news last week that Michael Grandage will step down next year as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse feels like one of those moments when an era ends. His ability to programme not only the small Donmar but also to bring excellent productions to the West End — notably Jude Law in Hamlet — is exemplified in the current mini-season at the Trafalgar Studios, which opened last night with American playwright Beau Willimon’s new play about the New Orleans floods of 2005.The concept of the play is simple. Following Hurricane Katrina, two African Americans, Malcolm and EZ, find themselves Read more ...
david.cheal
This was a warm and convivial evening in the company of the American folky-rootsy-rocky singer and songwriter Josh Ritter. His band made a rich noise, and his voice was keen and true, almost every lyric clearly audible. At the end of this, the last night of Ritter’s UK tour, the crowd – he seems to have a strong female following - were on their feet, and there were several calls of, “We love you, Josh!” from the stalls. And the songs, in which myth and metaphor and stories from the old America summoned up a world of ships and wolves and death and love and mountains (and cars, too), were Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You can see the appeal of being a slacker. You don’t work, you just sit around like a cool dude and shoot the breeze; you smoke, you drink, you take drugs, er, lots of drugs. You can call people “man”. Hell, you don’t even need to wear your sneakers all day - just kick them off and go barefoot. Only one problem: emotional commitment is a big no, no. American playwright Annie Baker’s new play, which opened at the Bush Theatre last night, takes a long calm look at slackerdom’s highs and lows.Thirtysomethings KJ and Jasper are committed slackers. They spend hours just chatting in a yard at the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Mindful that Dara Ó Briain ticked off one of my colleagues for revealing a punchline of his in his show, I can lumber without fear into reporting Rich Hall’s outing at the Wilde Theatre, Bracknell, as punchlines aren’t really what his comedy is all about. Morose as he looks on TV, on this very early date in an exhaustive 63-gig tour over the British Isles between now and December - I mean, Cambridge, Taunton, Dublin on consecutive days, or Hartlepool, Dundee, Durham (what is he travelling in? A helicopter?) - Hall had the audience on his side within seconds of starting.So he won’t be winning Read more ...
judith.flanders
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is making one of its regular stops in Europe (the company tours commitedly: not only in the USA, but more than two months of each year are spent bringing their bravura dance style to the world). It is to their enduring credit, then, that their performances look as fresh and as spontaneous as they do.In Hymn, artistic director Judith Jamison’s tribute to Ailey, her mentor and the company’s founder, she tells, in voice-over, of loving "spectacle, yes", but also "social statements, yes", wanting to transmit not only Ailey’s own "blood memories", his lines Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Alvin Ailey dancers have been dancing about survival, grit, positivity and joy in the Lord for half a century now, and even though the parents of last night’s dancers may not have been born when Ailey did the unthinkable and launched a black dance company in the dark days of 1958 America, the company still evidently has an urge to rejoice running in its veins.The regular returns of AAADC to Britain - and there’s a big nationwide tour this time - are constant wake-up calls to the spirit. How can you sit down-in-the-mouth about anything at all when you’re watching a girl haughtily unfolding her Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Ozarks, situated mostly in Missouri, are not on most tourists’ itineraries when they visit the United States. The area is not as pretty or dramatic as the Appalachians or the Rockies, and the mining and backwoods country is considered different, remote even, by many Americans. And while it has a distinct dialect and a rich oral and musical culture from its pioneer heritage of Irish, Scots and German immigrants who settled on the vast plateau in the early 19th century, the only representation many know of Ozark people is The Beverly Hillbillies. It’s in this self-contained world that Read more ...
sue.steward
Edward Weston was once obsessed with photographing "toilets" (his word) and did it repeatedly in pursuit of the perfect image. "That gloss enamelled receptacle of extraordinary beauty" is how he described the scuzzy lav at the Gold Circle Mine in Death Valley, and seemingly near-orgasmic with excitement, said it was "an absolute, aesthetic response to form". That statement wasn’t about toilets alone, of course; this legend of American photography was, understandably, a perfectionist in every thing he photographed. But he was also, during the early years of this collection of 37 prints (1920s Read more ...