America
Helen Hawkins
Nothing anybody over the age of 30 says about the new Mean Girls musical, spawn of Tina Fey’s witty script for the 2004 screen sideswipe of that name, will make any difference. As with all things Barbie, the pink madness seems deathless. Fey’s takedown of the human jungle that is the US high school has since been regurgitated as a film sequel, a film musical and now this stage musical, originally due here in 2018 but waylaid by lockdown. If you blindfolded me and played me a karaoke backing track of its score, minus lyrics, I wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was from Legally Blonde Read more ...
Tom Carr
Having propelled to stardom with their debut album Night Visions back in 2012, the Nevada pop-rock giants Imagine Dragons have reigned supreme on charts and airwaves.Their blending of elements from a wide range of genres into one melting pot, from rock to reggae, hip-hop to metal, has meant they’re a band with a little bit for everyone. Though their debut largely stayed true to a pop-rock foundation that was listenable and full of anthemic sing-a-longs, the boundaries on each album since have been pushed somewhat more noticeably.Take their 2014 follow up album, Smoke and Mirrors, which has Read more ...
David Nice
Any programme featuring Gershwin’s top large-scale works might tend to the “pops” side. Bernstein’s West Side Story Overture and even the sweet dream of Florence Price’s Adoration fit that bill. But An American in Paris sounded completely different from usual, its radical side highlighted, following Ives’s Three Places in New England and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Andante for Strings.Enterprising Tom Fetherstonhaugh and the (equally) young professionals of his Fantasia Orchestra have been regular visitors to Proms at St Jude's Music & Literary Festival – to give the full, unwieldy name of Read more ...
Jon Turney
For a couple of decades, the free video game America’s Army was a powerful recruitment aid for the US military. More than a shoot-em-up, players might find themselves dressing virtual wounds, struggling to co-ordinate tactics with their squad, and facing other supposedly realistic aspects of active service. The realism, of course, had one strict limit. If you died, you could reset the game and play again.The game is one of innumerable examples in Kelly Clancy’s book of how the invented reality of play worlds has an appeal which is functional for some, potentially catastrophic for others. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Helpfully, this is a film that reviews itself. Like it says on the posters, “They were making a cursed movie. They were warned not to. They should have listened.”If ever a film was meant not to be, here it is. Apparently it was going to be called The Georgetown Project, and writer-director Joshua John Miller shot the bulk of it in South Carolina in 2019. Then it was shelved, not least because of Covid. It was belatedly resurrected and some extra scenes added, but the botched-together result is dead on arrival.Not the least perplexing thing about it is how Russell Crowe, who was once a copper- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The best-known book about motorcycle gangs is Hunter S Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, a classic foundational text of the so-called “New Journalism”. It was published in 1966, two years before Danny Lyon’s The Bikeriders, the source material for Jeff Nichols’ new movie. Lyon (now 82) was primarily a photographer, but in this case accompanied his pictures with interviews with his subjects.Lyon didn’t just get close to the members of Chicago’s Outlaws Motorcycle Club, he became one of them. He recalled how Hunter Thompson “advised me not to join the Outlaws and to wear a helmet. I joined the club and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lincoln Center’s Bartlett Sher is back in town to direct the Barbican’s latest summer blockbuster, Cole Porter’s classic Kiss Me, Kate. It’s an energetic, largely intelligent production of what is at base a screwball comedy with great songs. With a book by Samuel and Bella Spewack, the main focus of this 1948 piece is a backstage will-they-won’t-they?, as a one-year-divorced couple, company boss / male lead Fred Graham (Adrian Dunbar, pictured below with Block) and his leading lady, Lilli Vanessi (Stephanie J Block), confront each other in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Almost exactly five years ago, I was transported by Singing It All Back Home, the third album from Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds. I gave it four stars, which in retrospect was perhaps a little ungenerous. Now at last comes a new opus from the duo, Strange News Has Come to Town, the making of which was “a long march across hard ground”, obstacles including the pandemic, as well as personal health and money issues.The self-drive of 21st century music-making makes “entry” into the world seem superficially easy but recording is only the first tiny step. Getting the music out there, reaching the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Benjamin Brewer’s post-apocalyptic, Nic Cage-starring creature feature finds a sombre interest in fatherhood and growing up in screenwriter Michael Nilon’s bleak scenario, after Paul (Cage) gathers up two abandoned babies with black smoke blooming, and a city falling into catastrophe.Fifteen years later, adopted siblings Joseph (It’s lead kid Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) live in a farmhouse under Paul’s sternly loving tutelage, foraging by day, and cowering when night brings monsters scratching at their door, much like A Quiet Place or a vampire flick. Arcadian was filmed Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The mournful, lonesome voice of John Moreland from Bixby, Oklahoma, will be known by a few, but not many, in this country. The 12 songs on his latest album, Visitor, released on the Thirty Tigers label, should help to remedy that.Visitor is the result of a self-imposed year of internal exile, commencing in November 2022, during which he did no shows, didn’t even use his mobile phone, and took time instead to rest and reflect, and eventually write. Visitor was recorded at home alone over ten days in late 2023, with Moreland on all instruments aside from a lead acoustic guitar on the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a category of movies that are best seen having read nothing about them. Susquatch Sunset falls into that blood group as its main pleasure comes from working out quite what's going on. Free of any dialogue, it functions as an oddball parody of a nature documentary as it follows an elusive family of mysterious bipeds over the changing seasons.We first spot four shaggy-haired, naked figures outlined on the horizon as dawn breaks in the deep-forested landscape of North America. Settling into a woodland glade, it becomes clear we are looking at two adult males, a female and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Viggo Mortensen has parlayed film stardom into the life of a hard-working, bohemian-minded gentleman scholar. His Lord of the Rings fees financed Perceval Press, which publishes books of poetry, photography and anthropology by himself and others, and Mortensen’s extensive discography as a musician.The company is named after a favourite knight in the legend of King Arthur, and there is something honourably chivalric in Mortensen’s life and work, filtered through socially open-minded acceptance of the modern world. His hard-riding, brooding Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03) Read more ...