New York
A Chorus Line, Sadler's Wells review - high-kicking fun that's low on pathosTuesday, 06 August 2024
A Chorus Line reigned supreme on Broadway from 1975 to 1990, a bold, bare-bones piece that for once put musical theatre’s hoofers in the spotlight. “As welcome as a rainbow after a thunderstorm” was Clive Barnes’s summation in the New York Times.It... Read more... |
Album: Meshell Ndegeocello - No More Water: The Gospel of James BaldwinSaturday, 27 July 2024
Meshell Ndegeocello's groundbreaking new album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin takes you on a musical journey which defies categorisation.Eight years in the making and set for release on 2 August – Baldwin's centennial – the album’s... Read more... |
Hello, Dolly!, London Palladium review - Imelda Staunton makes every line a deal-brokerFriday, 19 July 2024
Jerry Herman is the king of pep. Way too much of it in the first 20 minutes of the recent revue Jerry’s Girls had me screaming for a breather, but here the opening cavalcade, gorgeous overture included, intoxicates thanks to Dominic Cooke‘s razor-... Read more... |
Album: Moby - Always Centered at NightFriday, 14 June 2024
US electronic perennial Moby has had a good run. He was a rave culture phenomenon from 1991 onwards. He blew that with a vegan punk album. He released Play at the decade’s end and sold millions. He then had decadent superstar years, a run of huge,... Read more... |
Eric, Netflix review - a fairytale of New YorkThursday, 06 June 2024
New York in the 1980s is the setting for Abi Morgan’s new six-part drama, and it’s a city riddled with squalor, homelessness, racism and rampant crime. The Aids pandemic is also beginning to rear its hideous head. It’s here that the brilliant... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: CabriniTuesday, 04 June 2024
“Begin the mission and the funds will come,” says feisty, tubercular nun Francesca Cabrini (Christiana Dell’Anna; Patrizia in Gomorrah) to Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini) in 1889. She specialises in defying expectations, especially when men tell... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Matthew Modine on 'Hard Miles', 40 years in showbusiness and safer cyclingSaturday, 01 June 2024
Maybe California-born Matthew Modine caught the movie bug courtesy of his father Mark, who used to manage drive-in theatres, but after bagging his first film role in John Sayles’s Baby It’s You (1983) he never looked back. Blessed with a gift of... Read more... |
Between Riverside and Crazy, Hampstead Theatre review - race, religion and rough justiceThursday, 23 May 2024
It’s often said that contemporary American playwrights are too polite, too afraid of giving offence. But this accusation can’t be levelled at Stephen Adly Guirgis, whose dramas – from Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train in 2002 to The Motherfucker in... Read more... |
Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York), Criterion Theatre review - rueful and funny musical gets West End upgradeTuesday, 30 April 2024
Small-scale shows, nurtured in offbeat places, are becoming all the rage in the West End. Red Pitch, Operation Mincemeat, For Black Boys… have already made their mark, and now this quirky musical for just two performers joins them.It’s been a long... Read more... |
Scoop, Netflix review - revisiting a Right Royal nightmareFriday, 05 April 2024
What with the interminable Harry and Meghan saga, the death of the Queen and the recent health scares for Kate and King Chuck, this is just what the Royal Family needed – the exhumation of Prince Andrew’s catastrophic 2019 Newsnight interview with... Read more... |
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire review - a modest, well-meant returnSunday, 24 March 2024
Who you going to call? Five films into the Ghostbusters franchise, every persuadable survivor from the ’84 original, plus the ad hoc, Paul Rudd-led Spengler clan introduced in the series-reviving Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). The low-key, humane,... Read more... |
Robot Dreams review - short circuits of loveFriday, 22 March 2024
As everyone knows, the two most likeable creatures in the fictional world are the dog and the robot. Who doesn’t love a waggly tail or an aluminium cranium? So putting the two together in an animated movie looks like a Bennifer-perfect match.Robot... Read more... |
