sat 12/10/2024

family relationships

The Lehman Trilogy, Gillian Lynne Theatre review - three brothers, two crashes, one American Dream

Merchant bankers then eh? It’s not a slang term of abuse for nothing, as the middlemen collecting the crumbs off the cake (in Sherman McCoy’’s analogy from The Bonfire of the Vanities) have a reputation for living high on the hog off the ideas and...

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Portraits of Dangerous Women review - quirky indie comedy

“I like laws and rules,” Steph (Jeany Spark), a jaded primary school teacher, tells a pet-shop employee – she’s adopting a cat, though that venture is doomed to failure - defensively. “They’re what separate us from the monkeys and chaos.”In...

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Things Will Be Different review - lost in the past

Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.There’s golden American promise in the sun and shadow of the diner where Joseph (Adam David Thompson) meets sister Sidney (...

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Blu-ray: Crumb

Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have...

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Kim's Convenience, Riverside Studios review - KC and the sunshine vibe

One wonders what sitcom writers will do when supermarkets finally sweep the last corner shops away with nobody left old enough to buy cigarettes, nobody so offline that they buy newspapers and nobody eating sweets, priced out by sugar taxes. The...

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Reawakening review - a prodigal daughter returns, or does she?

“I’d know her. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Would I know her? Would I?” John (a brilliant Jared Harris, who’s also an executive producer) is always looking for his daughter, who ran away from home ten years ago at the age of 14 and hasn’t...

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The Silver Cord, Finborough Theatre review - Sophie Ward is compellingly repellent

One of the Finborough Theatre’s Artistic Director, Neil McPherson’s, gifts is an uncanny ability to find long-forgotten plays that work, right here, right now. He’s struck gold again with The Silver Cord, presenting its first London production for...

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Shifters, Duke of York's Theatre review - star-crossed lovers shine in intelligent rom-com

Pete Waterman, responsible (some might prefer the word guilty) for more than 100 Top 40 hits, said that a pop song is the hardest thing to write. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back – all wrapped up in three minutes. Benedict Lombe’s...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: In Two Minds / My English Persian Kitchen

In Two Minds, Traverse Theatre ★★★★ Mother is finally getting her kitchen extension. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’ll take several weeks. So she’ll have to move in – temporarily – with her Daughter, in her city studio flat, while the work...

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Fiddler on the Roof, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre review - dazzling gem of a production marks its diamond anniversary

If I were a rich man, I'd be inclined to put together a touring production of Fiddler on the Roof and send it around the world, a week here, a week there, to educate and entertain. But, like Tevye, I also have to sell a little milk to put...

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The Echo review - a beautiful but confusing look at life in a Mexican village

El Eco (The Echo) is a small village in Mexico’s central highlands, about two hours drive from Mexico City. But it might as well be thousands of miles away since it feels cut off from the outside world, especially for the women and children eking...

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Claire Messud: This Strange Eventful History review - home is where the heart was

Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History is personal: a novel, that is, strangely inflected by autobiography, a history that is simultaneously expansive and intimate. This fact is acknowledged in the book’s afterword; but it can also be found...

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