America
Helen Hawkins
The Sondheim gala show Old Friends is a must for fans of the master, naturally, but its quality would knock anybody who loves musical theatre for six. It’s the successor to a one-off gala of the same name staged in May 2022 and broadcast since by the BBC; a recording will soon be available. The line-up that night included Bernadette Peters, Judi Dench, Sian Phillips, Damian Lewis, Maria Friedman, Helena Bonham Carter, Haydn Gwynne, Julian Ovenden and Julia McKenzie. The last-named has lent her expertise to the current production, along with Matthew Bourne, who's in charge of the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Targets (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature is generally regarded as a great film. And yet, it came out of a mixture of false starts and opportunism. Could it be that its unique quality, the elements which make it stand out in the history of cinema, owed as much as anything else to the randomness that accompanied the movie’s creation?Bodganovich, a cinephile and writer for the magazine Esquire, had come to the attention of Roger Corman, the genius of low-budget horror and sleaze. After assisting him on a feature, Corman asked the eager young man to make a film with Boris Karloff, who Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Sufjan Stevens, so we’ve heard, has just been struck down with a rare and immobilising disease – the Guillain-Barré syndrome. With characteristic courage and faith, he has thrown himself into physical rehabilitation. That he should be so reduced and challenged with suffering resonates perhaps with the extraordinary vulnerability that distinguishes his work – a unique avalanche of remarkable albums, generous and brave collaborations.Stevens is among the mean of his generation who find strength in opening their hearts, singing in a high register close to falsetto, and risking the pain that Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Dance lovers with no access to a major city could feel genuinely hard done by were it not for Dance Consortium. This sainted organisation works to bring a company from overseas each autumn to a dozen or so large-scale theatres across the UK and Ireland – theatres whose dance offering might otherwise rarely extend beyond the latest Strictly spin-off.This year it’s the turn of Ailey 2, the younger sibling of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater that barely three weeks ago was garnering glowing reviews at Sadler’s Wells. And while it’s neither uncommon nor new for a major dance company to field a Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Less is more, except when it isn’t. Among the latest batch of overlong Oscar-tipped movies by celebrated auteurs such as Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer with a running time of 181 minutes) and Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon, 207 mins), it’s a relief to find the iconic Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar bucking the trend with a 31-minute short that doesn’t test the audience’s mental and physical stamina.His second English-language movie is visually more ambitious than its predecessor, The Human Voice (2020), a short monologue adapted from Jean Cocteau and starring Tilda Swinton. Read more ...
David Nice
Big Ben was chiming the quarter-hour as I hit the South Bank side of the river after a not terribly inspiring Remain rally in Parliament Square. What delight, then, to hear the wacky and wonderful Carol Williams playing Vierne’s “Carillon de Westminster” as the opening fanfare of her Royal Festival Hall organ hour. It’s one of my two favouite organ voluntaries – the other being the most famous, “the Widor Toccata”, and she ended with that. All was well, in fact, from start to finish.Williams announced at the beginning of her First Person piece for theartsdesk that she’d sat through so many “ Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The work of the double Pulitzer-winning Black American dramatist Lynn Nottage has thankfully become a fixture in the UK. After its award-winning production of Sweat, the Donmar will stage the UK premiere of her Clyde’s next month, and MJ the Musical, for which she wrote the book, arrives in the West End in March 2024.But not to be missed right now is her 2018 play Mlima’s Tale at the Kiln. Out of a magazine article about the ivory trade, Nottage has spun a Brechtian yarn of corruption and mendacity, minus the Verfremdung and with a surprising number of laughs, that suggests a whole world Read more ...
Carol Williams
I have always had a fascination with concert programmes. I did my Doctorate thesis on this subject. I remember vividly as a youngster attending many uninteresting programmes and thinking “there has to be more exciting, exhilarating, interesting music for the concert goer!” What type of repertoire makes audiences come back to solo organ concerts?The varied repertoire kept me alive and my studies at the Royal Academy of Music with David Sanger were priceless. I came from a musical family - Dad had an amazing ability to play the theatre organ, Mum the piano and Aunt Olwen played organ in church Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jenna Coleman has had a mostly upbeat acting CV to date, notably playing Clara in Doctor Who and the young Queen in ITV’s Victoria. The mood darkened with her excellent turn as the French-Canadian girlfriend of the mass murderer in The Serpent; now it turns to pitch with Wilderness.This time Coleman is Liv and attemptedly Welsh (the accent comes and goes), recently married to aspirational Englishman Will (Oliver Jackson Cohen), who is promoted to a plum job in New York by the luxury hotel company he works for. There, in her sumptuous apartment, where she is ostensibly writing an untitled Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Saphead gave Buster Keaton his first starring role in a full-length comedy, but 1923’s Three Ages is the first feature film which he wrote, produced, directed and starred in. Two-reelers were a form where he could go, in his words, “wild and crazy”, the more outlandish the visual humour the better.Feature films were based on narrative flow, Keaton later commenting that the jokes “had to be believable or your story wouldn’t hold up.” Watch Our Hospitality or The General and you’ll see what he means. Still, the gags which really stand out in Three Ages are the daft, unbelievable ones: Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The journey from off-Broadway to central London has taken 15 years, but the multi-award-winning musical Next to Normal has finally made it. That time lag may lead to suspicions that its subject matter has become a tad outmoded, but this staging, directed by outgoing Donmar director Michael Longhurst, is fresh and affecting.The scene looks set for a conventional tale of middle-age crisis, of a “normal” middle-class kind. Diana and Dan live in a glass box they designed themselves – they met as architecture students – complete with Bulthaup-style minimal kitchen and stainless steel fridge. Read more ...
David Nice
Funfairs and dance music, old world and new, should have guaranteed a corker of a second Prom from the Boston Symphony Orchestra with its chief conductor, Andris Nelsons. Glitter it did; but wit, drive and violence took a back seat to showcase sophistication, at least from where I was sitting in the hall (always a necessary qualification)If Nelsons seems to have lost the spark of his vintage days with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, his polish fits the classy Boston band very well – there’s little of the brave new brashness of the New York Philharmonic from these players, though Read more ...