obituary
Jasper Rees
Asked to nominate the most important playwright in America since the war, theatregoers would probably plump for Arthur Miller, Edward Albee or David Mamet. But in terms of sheer popularity there is another candidate. Neil Simon’s wiseacre comedies, many of them set in New York Jewish milieu into which he was born in 1927, were immensely popular from the off. His debut Come Blow Your Horn in 1960 ran on Broadway for nearly 700 performances.A child of the Depression who came of age at the end of the Second World War, he started out in radio and television writing gags for Phil Silvers and Sid Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Brian Friel, who died in 2015 at the age of 86, was a shy man who shunned interviews, keeping his powder dry for the work and shrouding his personal life in mystique. Not that he never opened his mouth at all. When Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) was winning Tony Awards in New York, he got into trouble for saying that a good stage manager is preferable to a director who disobeys the script. One or two American directors may have smirked when in 1993 Wonderful Tennessee closed on Broadway after nine performances. A year later Molly Sweeney won more awards in New York - a pleasing affirmation for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The second thing I noticed about Miloš Forman, who has died at the age of 86, was the spectacular imperfection of his English. All those decades in America could not muffle his foghorn of a Bohemian accent, nor assimilate the refugees from Czech syntax. The first thing was the heavy Cuban perfume that announced his proximity. It's a wonder America, almost as Stalinist about public smoking as his native Czechoslovakia once was about public speaking, never booted him out.He torched another reeking missile as he told of an English friend visiting New York "who hadn't been for several years, and Read more ...
Matthew Bourne
Nobody deserves the title of New Adventures “legend” more than Scott Ambler; nobody is remembered more affectionately – the generosity of spirit, the many kindnesses, the fierce loyalty, the tears of pride in company notes sessions, the endearing eccentricities and, of course, the highly embellished and hilarious stories are all legendary to those that knew and worked with him. A much-loved friend and colleague since the early days of Adventures In Motion Pictures (AMP), he was also instrumental in creating the unique style that is synonymous with New Adventures today.In 1990, having lost all Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 11 seasons of Frasier, John Mahoney played Marty Crane, a cussed blue-collar ex-cop who couldn’t quite understand how his loins came to produce two prissily cultured psychiatrists. His ally in straight-talking was his physiotherapist Daphne, whose fish-out-of-water flat-cap vowels were apparently the result of a gap in the scriptwriters’ field of knowledge. “When they wrote that Daphne is a working girl from Manchester," explained Mahoney, "they had no idea what that meant. The accent really threw them." It wasn't apparent from his Midwestern growl, but Mahoney was the one who was able to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Since releasing their first record, Bingo Masters Breakout, Mark E Smith (b 1957) has led The Fall through some of rock music’s most extreme and enthralling terrain, cutting a lyrical and musical swathe that few other artists can match. An outsider, self-confessed renegade, and microphone-destroying magus, Smith has seen dozens if not hundreds of musicians pass through the ranks of The Fall over the last 34 years. With their 28th studio album featuring a line-up that’s as stable as it gets in The Fall's rickety table of elements, they continue to make music like no other band, young or old. Read more ...
David Nice
A certain online scandalmonger and coffin-chaser likes to preface news of deaths in the musical world with "sadness" or "tragedy", usually when neither he nor we have heard of the person in question. But the end of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's two-and-a-half-year struggle with brain cancer really does make opera-lovers very sad indeed – not just because he was only 55, but also because one of the world's most beautiful lyric baritone voices still had much more to give. As with most great artists, though, he has left us a legacy on film and CD which guarantees him a certain immortality.Soul and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatre artist, political agitator, cultural advocate: Sir Peter Hall was all these and more in a career that defies easy encapsulation beyond stating the obvious: we won’t see his like again any time soon. He helped shape my experience and understanding of the arts in this country, as I am sure he did for so many others. “We don’t stand high in the world in many things,” he memorably told a room full of American journalists at a luncheon some 30 years ago, speaking of Britain at the height of Thatcherism, “[but] we stand high in the arts.” What he didn’t add was at every turn apparent: that Read more ...
theartsdesk
Sue Steward, who died suddenly last week from a brain haemorrhage, was one of theartsdesk’s most loved members, her free spirit and her double specialism in world music and photography making her an intrinsic asset to this pioneering critics’ site in 2009. Her unfussy eye for colour and composition also influenced the early design of The Arts Desk and traces remain today.With her talent for friendship she naturally drew other new music explorers into her circle of enthusiasm, as well as the photographers whose work she wrote about and curated with lilting sympathy. She made friends wherever Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sam Shepard came to live in London in 1971, nursing ambitions to be a rock musician. When he went home three years later, he was soon to be found on the drumstool of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour. But in between, not long after he arrived in London, he was waylaid by the burgeoning fringe scene, and the rock god project took a back seat. His reputation from the New York underground for courting danger, taking risks, living on the edge etc went before him, and the savage immediacy of his plays found a natural home in the small space houses of the capital.Outside the inner circle of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Just as the 200th anniversary is about to be celebrated of the great genius of 19th-century classical ballets, Marius Petipa, the creator of The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, half of Swan Lake, and many other masterpieces, his oeuvre's most remarkable reconstructor has died suddenly, aged only 55. Sergei Vikharev was the passionate pioneer of a brave new movement to install period sensibilities in an artform that had long become the plaything of its performers and coaches rather than its creators, and his death is devastating timing for ballet as well as for his family and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is the fate of a certain type of well-spoken classically trained actor to wear the livery of the English Establishment. Tim Pigott-Smith, double-barrelled and tall with a high forehead, was one such. But the full arc of his career encompassed vast breadth: he was a gifted tragedian, and a nifty comedian. “In television I was first cast as a cavalry officer because of my name,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2015. He brought an air of entitlement to the PM in Johnny English, the Foreign Minister in Quantum of Solace, various higher-ups in various uniforms in The Chief, The Vice, Read more ...