cabaret
Laura de Lisle
La Soirée is on the up-and-up. Beginning life as an after-hours show at the fringes of the Fringe in 2004, it won an Olivier in 2015 and has landed its first West End residency, a two-month run at the Aldwych Theatre over Christmas. Its acts – comedians, dancers, acrobats and aerialists – have performed all over the world, but the show lives up to its name: an entertaining evening, with nothing to really dazzle.Kudos to the producers for having the audacity to look at a 100-year-old theatre and think, "Let’s get a woman attached to that ceiling by her bun." The feat of engineering Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Over the last few months Paloma Faith has been talking up her fourth album, The Architect. There were self-perpetuated rumours of her rockin’ out, going off at a completely fresh musical angle, with lyrical content that sidestepped pop's usual concerns in favour of tackling societal issues and the state of things in our fucked-up world. Sounded good. However, a couple of clips of chatting about our duty to the welfare state and such, one featuring the writer Owen Jones, does not a political album make. In fact The Architect is business as usual, a continuation of the last album and not really Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ten years ago Brighton band 12 Stone Toddler burst onto the scene with two off-the-wall albums of madly inventive pop-rock. They then vamoosed back out of existence. Now they’re back, preparing a third album for the Freshly Squeezed label, and playing a packed home town gig. The second song they do is a new one, “Piranha” and it shows they’re no nearer normal. It’s a jagged, shouty thing with a catchy chorus about there being piranhas in the water, half football chant, half King Crimson. It’s edgy, deliberately bizarre, and oddly approachable, fun by way of musical obtuseness, just like the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
"An Evening with Pink Martini" consists of two sets by the Portland, Oregon group/mini-orchestra. Of these, the first takes the prize, but only by a very short lead. During it the nine-piece, led by Thomas Lauderdale at the piano, seem to relax and really allow spontaneity to take hold, in a manner that’s both risky and thrilling, in terms of stagecraft. At one point trombonist Antonis Andreou is coaxed to sing a number in Greek that he can hardly remember, which means moments of quiet conflab with lead singer Storm Large. Or there’s Large’s off-the-cuff, innuendo-filled and thoroughly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tom Lehrer famously declared satire dead when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger not long after he'd bombed Cambodia back to the Middle Ages. Lehrer never wrote another song. Meanwhile other satirists battle on. Every day delivers fresh material to work with. This documentary supplied a little more by rummaging around on Donald Trump's family tree.Put succinctly, Meet the Trumps: From Immigrant to President reported that the rise and rise and rise of the Trump dynasty is a tale of brothel-keeping, horsemeat burgers and much rapacious trousering of federal Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It would take a brave soul to mention Peter Mullan and “national treasure” in the same breath. To start with, he’d be more than clear which nation has his allegiance, and then suggest, in the gentlest possible way, that maybe he was, well, a wee bit young for any such honorifics...So we’ll leave that for another couple of decades, and just salute an actor whose presence on screen is so distinctive, compelling and most of all real. (And hope that we’ll see him back soon in the other capacity in which he has distinguished himself, as a director, with three films, Orphans, The Magdelene Sisters Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Brighton whooped as if she had never seen risqué entertainment last night, as cabaret veteran Joey Arias brought his Billie Holiday-meets-bawdy-standup show to the Brighton Festival. Able to switch between sincere tribute and brilliantly, cathartically filthy jokes instantaneously, he makes an audience unfamiliar with his style take a few minutes to calibrate their response. Once you understand that the Holiday is for real, and everything else tongue (or that’s what it looks like, anyway) in cheek, the evening makes curiously, but compellingly refreshing dramatic sense. The echoes Read more ...
geoff brown
The mixed grilled school of programme-making is not for the JACK Quartet. Contemporary, contemporary, and contemporary: that was the bill of fare last night at this challenging recital offered by the young American group, graduates of the Eastman School of Music, who derive their capitalised title from the initial letters of the members’ first names. Like the Arditti String Quartet, one of their mentors, you’d never find them playing Schubert. Even someone as gutsy and game-changing as Beethoven appears to be well off the menu. A pity, in a way. For the three knotty pieces Read more ...
David Nice
“It takes a star to parody one,” wrote theartsdesk’s Edward Seckerson, nailing the essence of this immortal spoof-fest’s last incarnation at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Star quality was assured given the presence of Damian Humbley, peerless in Merrily We Roll Along and even the unjustly short-lived Lend Me a Tenor, who’s in this transfer. Sophie-Louise Dann, a genius of a performer who dazzled as a prima donna in that last and even stole the show as a minor lovesick aesthete in a Proms Patience, isn’t – she’s busy preparing her Barbara Castle in Made in Dagenham just down the Strand, though Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Twenty years ago Ute Lemper came to the Usher Hall to sing Kurt Weill. The young pretender to the Lotte Lenya throne performed then on a bare stage with little more than a piano as accompaniment. Last night, she swept onto a platform crammed with a massively augmented Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with saxophone, guitar, banjo, rhythm section, accordion, grand piano, and a squadron of percussion. Microphones, foldback, and towers of gently whirring loudspeakers filled any remaining space. Seductive lighting dappled the walls.In her cabaret repertoire of Weill, Eisler, Marlene Dietrich and Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In her book How To Be a Woman, Times columnist Caitlin Moran explains the difference between strip clubs and burlesque shows, and why the latter are perfectly acceptable to feminism. “In burlesque, the power rests with the person taking their clothes off, as it always should do in polite society.” My Stories, Your Emails, which opened last night in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre, is cabaret artist Ursula Martinez’s way of making exactly the same point. Martinez was subjected to an unwanted level of exposure (sorry...) some years ago, when a video of her clever little striptease Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's hard to countenance sometimes that there was an era where Marc Almond could have been a bona fide, chart-smashing pop star. His ability to parlay the archest of high camp and the most grotesque of low life into something digestible by genuine mass culture was, from the very beginning, quite uncanny.There was always a sulphurous whiff of something downright Luciferian about him, yet enough fragility to make the act seem all too real – an infinitely more convincing and intriguing character than more recent more self-conscious attempts at “transgressive” pop like the gallumphing vaudeville Read more ...