Entertainment

Wednesday

Robert Jackman

At Las Vegas’s Sphere I saw the future of live arts

Does Elon Musk have a good eye for the aesthetic? Earlier this month, the Tesla magnate took a break from his incessant political posting to praise something he described as a ‘work of art’ – the Las Vegas Sphere. He then treated his 200 million Twitter followers to a video of an awed crowd, desperately angling their phones to capture the supposed majesty of the Sphere. Admittedly, it was hardly the first time that the Sphere has gone viral on social media. Since its grand opening last autumn, this very modern monument has had a knack for conquering the internet, with videos of its optical illusions prompting both awe and

Monday

Sam Leith

My fight with Viagogo

My wife had a brilliant idea for my 12-year-old daughter’s Christmas present: tickets to go and see Sigrid (a pop act, apparently, m’lud) at Wembley. She sent me a link. Quick, quick, I thought: get them while they’re hot. I clicked through and bought three old-fashioned physical tickets. I sucked up the delivery fee because I imagined, sentimentally, my daughter looking back years later on those yellowing stubs and remembering her first ever gig. First mistake: the site I’d clicked on was the resale site Viagogo. I should have checked the venue’s own ticketing site but I was on my phone, I’d clicked on the link my wife had sent

Thursday

Max Décharné

Capital entertainment: how the West End became the playground of London

The West End was always something a little apart. Some years ago, I used to go drinking with a man who had jointly run one of the best Soho live music clubs of the late 1950s and 1960s. He told me that they received a visit in their early days from the Kray brothers demanding protection money, who were summarily told, in his words, ‘to fuck off’. When I expressed surprise at this apparently dangerous response, he explained that while the twins meant a lot in Bethnal Green at that time, ‘up West’ it was a different story. Rohan McWilliam’s history of the West End explores the reasons for the