cabaret
David Nice
Read Erich Kästner’s 1928 novel about young Emil Tischbein and the Berlin boys he enlists to catch a thief, and you’ll come away feeling warm if slightly incredulous at the strong moral compass of all the kids and most of the adults. Gerhard Lamprecht’s early (1931) “talkie”, with a screenplay by Billy Wilder, has darker undertones, much admired by the obsessive 19-year-old Benjamin Britten. Carl Miller’s adaptation for Bijan Sheibani’s racy new National Theatre production sees it from a slightly different angle, scrupulously mindful of Weimar Berlin, but last night I had the feeling that not Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s hard to imagine much upstaging Martyn Jacques, the indomitable falsetto frontman of the Tiger Lillies. The gaping mouth of an enormous mythical fish that seems to have swum straight from the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch, projected right across the stage in their new show Rime of the the Ancient Mariner, comes close. The show is a glorious visual cabinet of curiosities that enthrals on all its surreal fronts, a version of madness that matches the lonely voice of Coleridge’s mariner with the sadness of Jacques’ lyrics and music – and the lyrical dominates here over the raw fury that the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nicky Haslam is best known as an interior designer. His clients include Rupert Everett, Bryan Ferry and Mick Jagger. His first book was called Sheer Opulence. He has also written, bred horses and performed in cabaret. Accompanying him on his album Midnight Matinee are Everett and Ferry, Cilla Black, Tracey Emin, Bob Geldof, Helena Bonham Carter, AN Wilson and Prince João of Orléans-Braganza. The press release proclaims Haslam, born in 1939, “the most promising performer of his generation.” Geldof declares that he “has… shown us all how it should be done,” and says Midnight Matinee is as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last two years have seen the Tiger Lillies hit a prolific peak of activity, to be found as often on the theatrical as the concert stage, drawing on plenty of influences from outside the UK to boot. Mike Pickering came on board last year in place of drummer Adrian Huge, who’d been part of the trio’s line-up from its founding back in 1989, but there was no let-up in levels of intensity last night from lead performer Martyn Jacques, who gave his all to a 90-minute set drawn from numbers from their last four albums, from 2011’s Woyzeck & the Tiger Lillies through to this year’s Either Or. Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The show which Ute Lemper brought to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the London Literature Festival - “Pablo Neruda: A Song Cycle of Love Poems” - is brand-new; the six-piece band (with which she has just recorded it, and which will be touring it) was performing it live for the first time. This Neruda project, a series of 12 love poems, is different from Lemper's most recent Charles Bukowski venture, which she succinctly described to Samira Ahmed this week on Women's Hour as "very garage, jazz-influenced, open, theatrical and dirty". As a continuous piece, the Neruda is also a departure Read more ...
David Nice
Who’d have guessed a full house for the third of The Rest is Noise festival’s Berlin nights? This time there were no obvious superstars, unless you follow singer-songwriter Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and you know the impeccable track-record so far of young conductor André de Ridder. The programme of three very different composing voices from the Berlin of the early 1930s was not a crowd-puller either; yet the audience of mostly twenty- and thirty-somethings even stayed and cheered for Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony, perhaps enticed by the promise of an after-interval encore Read more ...
David Nice
Given a fair few strange and languishing Brecht-Weill pieces that The Rest is Noise Festival’s Berlin strand might have explored, Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO had a tough time of it by piecing together a performing edition of the most familiar one. Stagings of Die Dreigroschenoper with singing actors and a deft director can knit this celebrated hybrid together. But a concert performance that tries to be true to the 1928 premiere’s mixture of balladeers and fairly hefty opera singers to fill out the updated, jazz-meets-Bach riff on John Gay’s thieves-den Beggar’s Opera will be very lucky to Read more ...
David Nice
It’s Weimar Berlin time as the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival moves through the 20th-century music scene – so it must be Liza Minnelli time too. Or must it? Though she’s immortalised through her Americanisation of Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret, the Kander and Ebb torchsong for which she is most famous, “Maybe This Time”, belongs very decidedly to the 1960s (it was written for Kaye Ballard, not for the 1972 movie). Well, we heard that, and how - a number in itself worth the top ticket price of £100. We also had Liza singing Cole Porter and a starry-eyed Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The first time I interviewed Marc Almond back in the late 1980s he had a pet snake with him, just one of the many things that sets him apart from today's stars. These days the only reptiles one sees around chart-toppers are the publicists. Almond has been part of the pop furniture for three decades but it was still something of a surprise to discover that he was celebrating his 55th birthday last night. Tempus fugit and all that. Or as the still-nimble black-clad crooner said to his mostly similarly-aged audience, "we are all in it together, dear".A decade ago Almond might have celebrated by Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kooky ladies are very much of the moment, an ongoing moment, actually - the last couple of years, to be precise - but they seem to be with us to stay which is surely a good thing, especially in the playground. Better them than unreconstructed pole-dancing, as promulgated by the Pussycat Dolls et al. Then there’s Gaga, of course, who’s a lot of both. Now the kook generation, from Ellie Goulding to Paloma Faith, have to decide (once they've steered clear of wannabe-Mariah X Factor tedium) what ratio of gay club 3am hard house stomp to inject into their cod-Kate Bush freakery.Marina Diamandis Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Here’s a mindboggling statistic. By my calculation, some 330,000 seats are going to be offered for sale in London and Birmingham for just one ballet this Christmas - that’s live seats, not counting the three (yes, three) cinema screenings of foreign Nutcrackers being beamed into the UK on a lot of holiday dates. So the dance industry reckon to sell up to half a million Nutcracker seats mostly in London in a bit over a month?I’m tallying up Royal Ballet (20 performances), Birmingham Royal Ballet (28), English National Ballet (35) and Matthew Bourne (47) live, not to mention New York City Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, the stars were out near Leicester Square, and it was neither the premiere of a Hollywood blockbuster, nor even a clear night. Instead, the stars were in conjunction at Gaby’s Deli, now the hotbed of a revolt against the plastification of London, a valiant push-back against the heart of theatre- and cinema-land being turned into a clone of every high street in the country.Gaby’s Deli has fed hundreds of thousands of audiences before and after shows, with its mix of Jewish deli and Middle Eastern favourites. It has also, crucially, fed thousands of actors, singers, dancers and musicians. Read more ...