musicals
CD: Judy Collins - A Love Letter to Stephen SondheimSunday, 19 March 2017
Judy Collins was one of the great folk icons of the 1960s, competing for the spotlight with Joan Baez. Where the latter was instrumental in bringing Bob Dylan to wide prominence, the former was crucial in putting Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen on... Read more... |
Stepping Out, Vaudeville TheatreWednesday, 15 March 2017
Richard Harris's award-winning comedy about a group of seven women and one man who attend a weekly tap-dancing class in a dingy north London church hall ran for three years from 1984 in the West End, from where it went to Broadway. It subsequently... Read more... |
Beauty and the BeastMonday, 13 March 2017
This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot. The stars – Emma Watson as Beauty and Dan Stevens... Read more... |
The Girls, Phoenix TheatreThursday, 23 February 2017
Why? That's the abiding question that hangs over The Girls, the sluggish and entirely pro forma Tim Firth-Gary Barlow musical that goes where Firth's film and stage play of Calendar Girls have already led. Telling of a charitable impulse that... Read more... |
The Wild Party, The Other PalaceTuesday, 21 February 2017
The Other Palace’s housewarming party certainly lives up to its billing as a wild one – wet and wild, in fact, as the first three rows are sporadically doused with bathtub gin. The theatre formerly known as St James, revamped by purchaser Andrew... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Cover GirlTuesday, 07 February 2017
Eureka’s restored print of Charles Vidor’s 1944 musical Cover Girl looks and sounds astonishingly vivid, especially when watched on Blu-ray. Would that everything were so simple: despite a starry creative team, the film makes for frustrating viewing... Read more... |
Death Takes A Holiday, Charing Cross TheatreTuesday, 24 January 2017
“I’m Death.” “And you’re on holiday?” Well, there’s really no way to disguise the preposterousness of this musical’s premise, nor to reconcile its winking humour and self-serious grand romance. Thus, Thom Southerland’s London premiere wisely diverts... Read more... |
Interview: Marius de Vries, musical director of La La LandSaturday, 14 January 2017
La La Land needs no further introduction. A homage to the golden age of the movie musical, to Michel Legrand and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it contains perhaps the catchiest score to come out of Hollywood in many years. Unless you have a heart of... Read more... |
Sound of Musicals with Neil Brand, BBC FourSaturday, 14 January 2017
"Oh what a beautiful morning! Oh what a beautiful day!" Curly the cowboy sang in the opening scene of Oklahoma!, the first musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943). In the midst of war here was sheer optimism and celebration set – with some nods... Read more... |
La La LandTuesday, 10 January 2017
An increasingly fractious America could take a leaf from the ravishing opening sequence of La La Land. A cross-section of drivers caught in LA freeway gridlock forsake their vehicles to become a dizzyingly frolicsome community that look capable of... Read more... |
West Side Stories: The Making of a Classic, BBC TwoTuesday, 27 December 2016
The last time BBC TV headed over to West Side Story, it landed itself with a contradiction. Christopher Swann’s 1985 fly-on-the-wall documentary The Making of West Side Story – about Leonard Bernstein recording his celebrated score with a cast of... Read more... |
Christmas Book: When Broadway Went to HollywoodSaturday, 24 December 2016
Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic tome with an austere assemblage of black-and-white... Read more... |
