San Francisco
Mrs Doubtfire, Shaftesbury Theatre review - bold musical makeover of the hit comic filmFriday, 23 June 2023
The heart sinks (mine does, anyway) as the latest film-to-musical adaptation rolls into town, all with similar sound-worlds, exemplary hoofing and lively stagings. They are handy audience-bait, oven-ready stories. People go to see how the creative... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: The Beau Brummels - Turn Around The Complete Recordings (1964-1970)Sunday, 19 December 2021
“I do like this record. Despite their tremendously loser name, this group from America is pretty good. They have a sound of their own added to by Byrd-like guitar playing and Everly Brothers voices. In a funny way, it’s rather sexy.”Although Penny... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Tim Buckley - Merry-Go-Round at the CarouselSunday, 01 August 2021
Anyone in San Francisco on 15 and 16 June 1968 would have had a tough choice if they wanted to see live music. On Saturday the 15th, Big Brother & the Holding Company and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown were playing The Fillmore. That night, The... Read more... |
Album: Charles Webster - Decision TimeWednesday, 18 November 2020
Charles Webster is one of those connecting figures who make the idea of “the underground” seem quite convincing. Originally from the Peak District but coming of musical age in Nottingham, he was inspired by Chicago house and Detroit techno music... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Criss CrossTuesday, 30 June 2020
Criss Cross is a superbly taut film noir, a 1949 drama that unfolds with the inevitable downward spiral of ancient tragedy. Its doomed characters are prisoners of a hopeless struggle for freedom, caught in the web of their transgressive desires.... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Ives, Shchedrin, VeprikSaturday, 14 March 2020
Ives: Symphonies 3&4 San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 3, subtitled ‘The Camp Meeting’, was completed in 1911 but waited until 1946 for its premiere, long after Ives had given up... Read more... |
Rebecca Solnit: Recollections of My Non-Existence review - feminism, hope and the great American WestSunday, 08 March 2020
Rebecca Solnit’s autobiography, Recollections of My Non-Existence, is just as you might expect it to be – tangential, changeable, deeply feminist, and imbued with a sense of hope that undercuts her wild anger at the world’s injustices. It says much... Read more... |
Show Me the Picture: The Story of Jim Marshall review - needles, guns and grassSaturday, 01 February 2020
In photographer Jim Marshall’s heyday in the 60s and 70s, before the music business became corporate and restrictive, and before Marshall unravelled – he was partial to cars, cocaine and guns as well as cameras – musicians asked for him, they... Read more... |
The Last Black Man in San Francisco review - gentle gentrification bluesSunday, 27 October 2019
San Francisco has rarely looked more unattainably golden than in Joe Talbot’s Sundance prize-winning gentrification parable. Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) once belonged inside the city’s Californian Dream, symbolised for him by the grand Victorian-style... Read more... |
JT Leroy review - pseudonym, avatar, literary hoaxWednesday, 14 August 2019
Based on Savannah Knoop’s memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I became JT LeRoy, Justin Kelly’s film skims the surface of the sensational literary hoax of the early 2000s, that far-off time before avatars, gender fluidity and fake online identity were part of... Read more... |
Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, Netflix, review - sex and dope soap is back in San FranciscoFriday, 07 June 2019
It helps to be of a certain vintage to appreciate the first impact of Tales of the City. Armistead Maupin’s column, begun in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978 as a frank and joyous portrayal of gay culture, became a series of half a dozen cult... Read more... |
San Francisco Ballet, Liang/Marston/Pita, Sadler's Wells - elemental, ethereal and kitschy, tooTuesday, 04 June 2019
Sun, snow, and some unadorned silliness danced to the music of Björk: no one can accuse San Francisco of casting an insufficiently wide tonal (or climatic) net in this second of four programmes on view from San Francisco Ballet as part of their... Read more... |
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