New York
'It’s more fun to dance in a tutu': Tory Dobrin of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte CarloWednesday, 12 September 2018
Forty years on from its beginnings as part of New York's gay lib movement, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is playing to a global, largely straight audience. As the company launches a major UK tour, starting this week at the Peacock Theatre in... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The ProducersTuesday, 11 September 2018
Few things divide opinion as much as comedy, and we’ve all had the experience of sitting through a film stony-faced while all around collapse with mirth. What tickles you? Erudite Wildean wordplay, or the simple joys of watching a fat bloke fall... Read more... |
Prom 57, On the Town, LSO, Wilson review - symphonic dances and sassy vocalsSunday, 26 August 2018
1944 was one hell of a year for Bernstein the composer, with a perfect ballet and a near-perfect musical sharing a general theme of three sailors loose in New York, but nothing else, in their boisterous originality. Perhaps their only equal among... Read more... |
Little Shop of Horrors, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre review - monstrously entertainingSaturday, 11 August 2018
The resplendent partnership of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman – which produced Disney hits Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid – first took root with this 1982 Off-Broadway musical, based on a low-budget Sixties film, about a... Read more... |
Homos, or Everyone in America, Finborough Theatre review - a complex pattern of glee and profundityFriday, 10 August 2018
I’m still not entirely sure what the full associations of the title of New York playwright Jordan Seavey’s new play – its second element, at least: the first speaks for itself – may be, but with writing this accomplished any such uncertainties fall... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Louis Couperin, Pärt, Bruce LevingstonSaturday, 04 August 2018
Louis Couperin: Dances from the Bauyn Manuscript Pavel Kolesnikov (Hyperion)We’ll get the entertaining trivia out of the way first, namely that the musical Couperin dynasty came from Chaumes-en-Brie. I’m struggling to think of another example... Read more... |
Rachel Heng: Suicide Club review - skin-deep dystopiaSunday, 29 July 2018
When Lea is nervous she picks at the skin near the nail of her thumb. When she draws blood the wound repairs instantly because she is a member of the Second Wave endowed with SmartBlood™ and DiamondSkin™. Aside from this tic she is an otherwise... Read more... |
Reporting Trump's First Year: the Fourth Estate, BBC Two review - all hands on deck at the Gray LadyMonday, 25 June 2018
The cataclysm of Donald Trump’s election was like a second 9/11 for the East Coast elite (and not just them, obviously). It was a world turned upside down, the centre couldn’t hold, and, worst of all, why did nobody see it coming?Nowhere was it felt... Read more... |
The Town Hall Affair, The Wooster Group, Barbican review - electric anarchyFriday, 22 June 2018
Iconoclasm, orgasms, and rampant rhetoric are all on irrepressible display in The Wooster Group’s recreation of the 1971 Manhattan debate that pitted Norman Mailer against some of the leading feminists of the day. The evening proved almost as... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Force of EvilTuesday, 19 June 2018
Force of Evil is much more than a stunning film noir classic: it’s first and foremost a film about money and power and their tragic power of attraction. Set in the world of the numbers racket in New York, where the big combinations, created by... Read more... |
Ocean's 8 review – half-cocked caperMonday, 18 June 2018
Perfectly timed, in theory, for the advent of #MeToo and Hollywood’s post-Weinstein era, this girl-power redesign of the Ocean franchise has lined up a turbo-charged cast and then not given them anything very interesting to do. Director and co-... Read more... |
Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill, Opera North, City Varieties Music Hall review - life as a cabaretMonday, 18 June 2018
Peer at the small print and it’s clear that Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill is actually a spruced-up repackaging of a show originally devised by Gene Lerner and arranger Newton Wayland, about whom Opera North’s programme tells us nothing. The... Read more... |
