America
DVD/Blu-ray: Freak ShowFriday, 08 March 2019
You might think an American high school comedy an unlikely place to locate a love letter to Oscar Wilde – even if there’s a flamboyantly gay story behind it. But Freak Show screenwriters Beth Rigazio and Patrick J Clifton, adapting James St James’... Read more... |
Leaving Neverland: Michael Jackson and Me, Channel 4 review - sordid revelations from the court of the King of PopThursday, 07 March 2019
Not just the Peter Pan of Pop, but also its very own Houdini. With the aid of shed-loads of money, an illusion-spinning PR machine and the most aggressive lawyers that money could buy, Michael Jackson managed to make it to his premature exit in 2009... Read more... |
A Previn treasurySaturday, 02 March 2019
In a way, he was a second Bernstein. Only 11 years Lenny's junior, and living to the much riper age of 89 – his 90th birthday would have been on 6 April – André Previn was a film composer and arranger at the start of his 70-plus-year career, a jazz... Read more... |
CD: Our Native Daughters - Songs of Our Native DaughtersMonday, 25 February 2019
Although this is a review of an album and not a single song, Rhiannon Giddens’s extraordinary “Mama’s Cryin’ Long” is the hub (or perhaps emotional black hole might be a more apt description) around which the rest of this collection of new material... Read more... |
Sam Bourne: To Kill the Truth review - taut thriller of big ideasSunday, 24 February 2019
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning. The premise of Sam... 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... |
Shipwreck, Almeida Theatre review - Trump-inflected fantasia mixes the polemical and the poeticThursday, 21 February 2019
Just when you think you may have heard (and seen) enough of Donald J Trump to last a lifetime, along comes Anne Washburn's ceaselessly smart and tantalising Shipwreck to focus renewed attention on the psychic fallout left by 45. How did we get here... Read more... |
On the Basis of Sex review – real-life legal dramaWednesday, 20 February 2019
When the world is as crazy as it is right now, its political life dominated by dolts and villains, it needs a new kind of hero. That’s why Americans are embracing an octogenarian woman with more guts and integrity than virtually anyone at her level... Read more... |
Gently Down the Stream, Park Theatre review - gay history sifted for compact dramaTuesday, 19 February 2019
Ripeness is sometimes all. 80-year-old Martin Sherman's recent play, receiving its UK premiere at canny Park Theatre, says more about gay history in 100 selective minutes than The Inheritance managed in six and a half hours. True, it's not aiming at... Read more... |
9 to 5 the Musical review - Dolly Parton's film returns as retooled version of a Broadway flopMonday, 18 February 2019
A musicals-intensive season gets off to a wan start with 9 to 5, a retooled West End version of a 2009 Broadway flop based on the beloved 1980 film that proffered a sisterhood for the ages in the combo of Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin.... Read more... |
The American Clock, Old Vic review - Arthur Miller's musical history lesson dragsThursday, 14 February 2019
This year’s unofficial Arthur Miller season – following The Price and ahead of All My Sons at the Old Vic and Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic – now turns to his 1980 work, The American Clock, inspired in part by Miller’s own memories of the... 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... |
