magic
Thomas H. Green
This is a soundtrack with vast shoes to fill. Frozen, The Lion King and Aladdin may be the best-selling Disney soundtracks but, alongside The Jungle Book, the original 1964 Mary Poppins has the most beloved array of songs. It takes chutzpah to try and match a set that includes such childhood standards as “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, “Chim Chim Cher-ee” and “A Spoonful of Sugar”. That the music from Mary Poppins Returns makes a spirited and expertly calibrated attempt is a nice surprise.The man who took on what could have been a poisoned chalice is Hollywood showbiz orchestration Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Two years after the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, we return to the Wizarding World once again for the next, somewhat convoluted, chapter in the five planned prequel instalments, with Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Eddie Redmayne reprises his role as the bashful but brilliant Magizoologist, Newt Scamander (pictured below), joined by muggle-baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), and witches Tina (Katherine Waterston) and Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol). Leaving New York, the quartet from the first film travel to a jazz-age Paris on the hunt for the troubled Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London’s Palace Theatre this week celebrated the thousandth performance of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which opened there back in 2016. Like everything else JK Rowing puts her hand to, it’s been an outrageous success, taking the post-Hogwarts wizarding world further into the future than any other part of the franchise. At least that’s what I understand: I’ve only watched four of the films and read none of the books. However, the music from the production, in and of its own right, assuredly has something.Imogen Heap has been many times around the music biz block, never quite making it Read more ...
David Kettle
Home ★★★★ Philadelphia-based theatre artist Geoff Sobelle has scored highly with two previous Edinburgh Fringe shows. Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, way back in 2010, imagined the natural world wreaking ruthless vengeance on the mundanity of modern business in bizarre visual spectacles, while the smaller-scale The Object Lesson in 2014 was a more reflective work on objects and memory, with a jaw-dropping magic trick as its poignant conclusion.Home is Sobelle’s debut at the International Festival, and his most ambitious Edinburgh offering to date, presenting Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s an event that only comes around once a generation: a new Matt Groening TV series. The Simpsons is rightly regarded as one of the greatest shows ever made. It changed the face of American television, and 10 years later was followed Futurama, a series that may lack the cross-demographic appeal of its predecessor, but consistently produced satirical masterpieces. Now, with a vastly changed viewing landscape, Groening makes the jump to streaming giants Netflix with his new show Disenchantment. The question is, can lightning strike thrice?On first appearances, probably not. Disenchantment is Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête had been planned as a slice of wartime escapism, a distraction from the privations of war. The film was also a chance for Cocteau to give his male lead Jean Marais a less overtly sexy role than his fans were used to, though there’s still a lot of smouldering going on, some of it literal. Many would argue that this is the greatest cinematic fairytale, and it looks stunning in this high definition restoration (its first appearance in HD in the UK). Everything works here; Cocteau’s unfussy, poetic screenplay brilliantly served by Christian Bérard’s designs and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nick Mohammed doesn't do things by halves as his chatty airhead alter ego Mr Swallow. Forget the scholarly approach of finely researched biographies of Harry Houdini (“boring!”); his “first-ever entirely true auto-biopic” of the magician and escapologist comes complete with conjuring tricks, song-and-dance numbers and a whole lot of laughs.Ably assisted by David Elms as Mr Goldsworth and Kieran Hodgson as Jonathan (in oriental tunics for no discernible reason), plus an onstage pianist, Mr Swallow chatters on, while Mr Goldsworth, the producer of this show within a show, has a devil of a job Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Harry Potter lives to see another day. The Hogwarts wizard has made his stage debut in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part play that pushes JK Rowling’s world-beating franchise beyond the realm of fiction and film to embrace live action: the bespectacled boy has become an angsty grown-up, and London theatre is much the richer for it.But are these characters really three-dimensional? The answer is a resounding yes, if a moist-eyed audience following Sunday’s final curtain is any gauge. Indeed, the resounding irony across the marathon of more than five hours is that a production so Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Derren Brown calls himself a mentalist, but he's also a great showman, as his latest show, Miracle, attests. With its simple set, this is seemingly an evening of straightforward illusions. But that's deceptive, as Brown provides more than two hours of intricately constructed theatre that has a very big message – that humans have the power within ourselves to change our lives, and to heal ourselves.It's difficult to review a show where the performer has asked the audience and critics to keep shtum about what goes on, and I'll try not to reveal any of the several “wow” moments in the show. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comedians offer rich pickings to dramatists – whether they fall into the crying clown category, or the nice bloke on stage and complete arse off it, or the side-splittingly funny performer who is as boring as watching paint dry in real life. So no surprise then that Tommy Cooper (1921-1984) is the latest funny man to get a television biopic, following in the wake of Kenneth Williams, Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd and Hattie Jacques.It's a good thing that, like those other comics, Cooper (David Threlfall) is dead (he famously died on stage live on television), for Simon Nye's drama was a warts- Read more ...
Andy Plaice
In its infancy back in 1997, Jonathan Creek felt fresh and inventive, with clever little swipes at the entertainment industry and a new take on crime drama: not who or why, but more of a howdunnit. Its star Alan Davies, he of the duffel coat and the tumbling hair, was rather good at narrowing his eyes and staring into space while we let our hot chocolate go cold waiting to discover not only who carried out one of those incredibly theatrical murders, but to see its baffling mechanism unpicked.And now he’s back for series five, doing rather nicely in marketing and with his days as a deviser of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This movie has a couple of key advantages - it doesn't have any serial killers or zombies in it. It also pays the audience the compliment of assuming that it has a certain amount of intelligence, enough at least to appreciate being bamboozled by its relentless cleverness and convoluted trickery.It's a strange beast, though. I thoroughly enjoyed about 70 per cent of it as it took off on a whirling thrill-ride which seemed to defy the laws of physics and probability. But perhaps inevitably, all those spinning plates came crashing back to earth as director Louis Leterrier struggled to tie Read more ...