New York
Blu-ray: The Big ClockTuesday, 07 May 2019
John Farrow’s inexplicably neglected 1948 thriller The Big Clock is a difficult work to pigeonhole, combining traces of noir, screwball comedy and suspense. Farrow’s source material was a novel by poet and pulp fiction writer Kenneth Fearing, here... Read more... |
Ain't Misbehavin', Southwark Playhouse review - a jazz-hot musical revueThursday, 25 April 2019
The joint is jumpin’ at Southwark Playhouse, now hosting an irresistible Fats Waller-inspired, Manhattan-set musical revue (a co-production with Colchester’s Mercury Theatre, where it opened last month). Though originating in the Seventies,... Read more... |
Sweet Charity, Donmar Warehouse review - Sixties style over substanceThursday, 18 April 2019
For her swansong, departing Donmar Artistic Director Josie Rourke goes Swinging Sixties in this stylish but flawed revival of the Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon musical. From the numerous Andy Warhol homages to Charity’s silver minidress... Read more... |
CD: The Drums - BrutalismMonday, 01 April 2019
The Drums appeared a decade ago out of New York, riding a media froth about indie music to critical acclaim and, at least for their debut album, some degree of commercial success. They were a four-piece who owed a large debt to New Order but had... Read more... |
Pose, BBC Two review - transgender goes mainstreamFriday, 22 March 2019
NYC, 1987. AIDS is ravaging the city, Reagan’s in power, Trump is in his tower. The American dream is available - to some. And for some of those to whom it’s not, there’s the world of balls, vogueing and competing for trophies. If your family has... Read more... |
The Kindergarten Teacher review - obsession, talent and the power of poetryFriday, 08 March 2019
Lisa, the kindergarten teacher in question (a mesmerising Maggie Gyllenhaal), is taking evening classes in poetry. Twenty years of teaching and raising her three kids, now monosyllabic, mean teens, have left her desperate for culture and a creative... Read more... |
Follies, National Theatre review - the Sondheim spectacular returns, better than everSaturday, 23 February 2019
This is a golden age of London Sondheim revivals, with Marianne Elliott’s thrilling Company still playing in the West End, and Dominic Cooke’s Follies getting a hugely welcome second run at the National – both testament to a director’s... Read more... |
Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, Young Vic review - shards of power amidst much that is overwroughtFriday, 22 February 2019
An entirely electric leading performance from the fast-rising Ukweli Roach is the reason for being for revisiting Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, back in London for the first major production since the late Philip Seymour Hoffman brought his acclaimed... Read more... |
All About Eve, Noel Coward Theatre review - less a bumpy night than an erratically arresting oneThursday, 14 February 2019
Women spend a lot of time gazing at themselves in the mirror in the Belgian auteur director Ivo van Hove's latest stage-to-screen deconstruction, All About Eve, which is based on one of the most-beloved of all films about the theatre: the 1950 Oscar... Read more... |
The Price, Wyndham's Theatre review - David Suchet stands supremeTuesday, 12 February 2019
There’s a rather sublime equilibrium to Arthur Miller’s 1968 play between the overwhelmingly heavy weight of history and a sheer life force that somehow functions, against all odds, as its counterbalance. But in purely dramatic terms the scales of... Read more... |
Can You Ever Forgive Me? review - no page unturned in a comedy about literary forgerySaturday, 02 February 2019
What is it with all these new films based on biographies? Vice, Green Book, The Mule, Stan & Ollie, Colette… and that’s before we even get to the royal romps queening up our screens. At least Can You Ever Forgive Me? brings a lifestory... Read more... |
Cost of Living, Hampstead Theatre review - tough but tenderFriday, 01 February 2019
The Off Broadway production of Cost of Living two years ago brought Martyna Majok the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the height of acclaim of which most new writers – Majok, with four plays behind her, has yet to turn 35 – can only dream. High... Read more... |
