America
Martha Reeves and The Vandellas, Dingwalls review - What's going on? Good questionTuesday, 27 August 2019
There’s something truly sad and dispiriting about listening to an artist trash their back catalogue and absolutely totally ruin their greatest song, especially when that song has acquired anthemic status and been chosen to be preserved by the... Read more... |
Karl Marlantes: Deep River review - growing pains of a nation of immigrantsSunday, 25 August 2019
Karl Marlantes’s Deep River is an all-American novel. And why should it not be? Marlantes is an all-American author. He grew up in small-town Oregon, attended Yale (and Oxford), fought and was heavily awarded as a Marine in Vietnam, then settled... Read more... |
Hail Satan? review - the detail of the devilSaturday, 24 August 2019
As Penny Lane’s documentary shows, America and Satanism have a long history. From the Salem Witch trials to the moral panic triggered by the Manson murders and films like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in the 1970s, mass panic in America of the... Read more... |
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark review - mild-mannered nightmaresSaturday, 24 August 2019
Guillermo del Toro considered directing this adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s bestselling campfire tales, and his sensibility can still be discerned in its kind sort of fantasy and concern with outsiders. He finally settled for producing, and turning... Read more... |
Appropriate, Donmar Warehouse review - fraught family reunion blisteringly toldFriday, 23 August 2019
You can’t fail to feel the ghosts in Appropriate at the Donmar Warehouse: they are there in the very timbers of the ancient Southern plantation house that is the setting for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s fraught – and often very funny – family... Read more... |
CD: Tanya Tucker - While I'm Livin'Friday, 23 August 2019
When Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin released the former’s stripped back, soul-bearing American Recordings in 1994 the impact was massive. Not only did it show a way that country music could cross over to a much wider audience, the alt-rock crowd, for... Read more... |
theartsdesk at Bard Summerscape Festival 2019: unknown treasures and crosscurrents galoreSunday, 18 August 2019
There could be no greater gift to any festival director than Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Where the exploration of his life, times and contemporaries is concerned, this composer is a veritable Spaghetti Junction for different strands of genre,... Read more... |
The Hold Steady - Thrashing Thru the PassionThursday, 15 August 2019
At recent live shows, Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn has taken to describing the band’s current lineup as the best it’s ever been. Boosted to a six-piece by the return of Franz Nicolay on keyboards, the Hold Steady of the band’s latter-day London... Read more... |
Edinburgh International Festival 2019: Colin Currie Group, BBCSSO, Dausgaard/DiDonato, NYO-USA, PappanoSaturday, 10 August 2019
With Peter Gynt, the National Theatre’s “reboot” of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, topping the drama bill at the Edinburgh Festival hotfoot from London, it was almost obligatory to find a space somewhere in the music programme for Grieg’s famous incidental... Read more... |
CD: Bon Iver – i,iSaturday, 10 August 2019
If you’ve been paying attention, you might have already heard most if not all of Bon Iver’s curiously named i,i album – weeks before its physical release on August 30. The band debuted two tracks (“Hey Ma” and “U (Man Like)”) at London’s All Points... Read more... |
Blues in the Night, Kiln Theatre review - hard times, hot tunesThursday, 25 July 2019
It’s too darn hot, BoJo is in Downing Street, and we’re all going to Brexit hell – so we might as well sing the blues. Or at least take a night off from the apocalypse to enjoy a virtuoso company singing them for us in this rousing revival of... Read more... |
The View UpStairs, Soho Theatre review - well-intentioned but needs a rewriteWednesday, 24 July 2019
If good intentions were all, The View UpStairs would be Gypsy. As it is, the European premiere of this 2017 Off Broadway musical set in a New Orleans gay bar firebombed by arson in 1973 serves both as an important reminder of a grievous event in... Read more... |
