fri 11/07/2025

love

Aspects of Love, Southwark Playhouse review - discourse keeps passion at bay

“Love Changes Everything”, as immortalised by Michael Ball, is the most enduring feature of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Charles Hart’s 1989 musical – a moderate West End success, and a Broadway flop. Jonathan O’Boyle’s production, seen last...

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An Impossible Love review - toxic romance across the years

This is a love that begins sweetly, turns terrible, and is told with unflinching directness. Directed by Catherine Corsini, An Impossible Love is based on a novel by Christine Angot (known in France, and increasingly elsewhere, for her powerful...

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Company, Gielgud Theatre review - here's to a sensational musical rebirth

The most thrilling revivals interrogate a classic work, while revealing its fundamental soul anew. Marianne Elliott’s female-led, 21st-century take on George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy Company makes a bold,...

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Classical CDs Weekly: Handel, William Howard, Professor Chill

Handel: Works for Keyboard Philippe Grisvard (harpsichord) (Audax)Mention Handel's keyboard output and most folks (including saps like me) will think of his eight imposing Suites… and that's about it. Which is why harpsichordist Philippe Grisvard’s...

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The Bisexual, Channel 4 review - joyless comedy drama

Write about what you know, every nascent novelist is told. So you can't fault writer/director/actor Desiree Akhavan, Iranian-American creator of Appropriate Behaviour (2015) and The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018), which explore divergent...

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Lavinia Greenlaw: In the City of Love’s Sleep review - curated lives

Iris is a museum conservator with a pair of pre-adolescent daughters and a failing marriage. Raif is a widower and an academic who, since writing a book on curiosity cabinets a decade ago, has quietly sunk into a kind of irrelevance. Both have...

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Heathers The Musical, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - a sardonic take on teen angst

This London premiere of Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s 2010 musical (based on Daniel Waters’ oh-so-Eighties cult classic movie, starring Christian Slater and Winona Ryder) had a development period at The Other Palace – no critics allowed...

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Cold War review - a gorgeous and mesmerising romance

Can we ever really know the passion that brought our parents together? By the time we are old enough to hear the story of how they first met, that lovers’ narrative has frayed in the telling and faded in the daily light of domestic familiarity. But...

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A Sicilian Ghost Story review - a beautiful, confusing journey

Childhood is an inimitable experience – the laws of the world are less certain, imagination and reality meld together, and no event feels fixed. A Sicilian Ghost Story recreates this sensation in the context of real world trauma, producing a...

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Ariadne auf Naxos, Opera Holland Park - stylish staging, world-class singing

"When the new god approaches, we surrender, struck dumb". Especially if, for the singer of those words, popular entertainer Zerbinetta, the “new god” takes the shape of same-sex love. Director and designer Antony McDonald locates the real “mystery...

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CD: Beth Rowley - Gota Fría

Gota Fría, or “cold drop”, is a Spanish weather phenomenon associated with violent rainstorms, when high pressure has caused a pocket of cold air to dissociate itself from the warmer clouds. Meteorologists, please excuse my basic and probably...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Let the Sunshine In

Un beau soleil intérieur, the film’s French title, is part of a piece of advice given by a clairvoyant (Gérard Depardieu, in a surprise 15-minute cameo at the end of the movie). Try to find the beautiful sun within, he tells Isabelle (a glowing...

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