The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Grade: B+ Tony Hawk is an old guy these days. The most famous sk8r boi ever to have lived is now 57. A sk8r geezer, if you will; and the video games celebrating his glory days are of an age too. Gamer-geezers who remember losing hours to the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games will
Giselle is my favourite among the 19th-century classics. Blessed with a charming score by the melodically fertile Adolphe Adam and a serviceable but resonant plot, the drama – loosely based on a story by Heine – holds water without being swollen by superfluous divertissements. Its principal characters – the village maiden Giselle and her nobleman-in-disguise
Inter Alia, a new play from the creators of Prima Facie, follows the hectic double life of Jess, a crown court judge, played by Rosamund Pike. As a high-flying lawyer with a family to care for, she knows that ‘having it all’ means ‘doing it all’. When not in court, she skivvies non-stop for her
On 17 June 1872, Johann Strauss II conducted the biggest concert of his life. The city was Boston, USA, and the promoters provided Strauss with an orchestra and a chorus numbering more than 20,000. One hundred assistant conductors were placed at his disposal, and a cannon shot cued The Blue Danube – the only way
‘There is good music, bad music, and music by Ambroise Thomas,’ said Emmanuel Chabrier, but then, Chabrier said a lot of things. I adore Chabrier – who couldn’t love the man who wrote España and turned Tristan und Isolde into a jaunty quadrille? – but it doesn’t do to take him too literally. Thomas ended
The highs of Stevie Wonder’s Hyde Park show were magnificently high. The vast band were fully clicked into that syncopated, swampy funk, horns stabbing through the synths, the backing singers adding gospel fervour. And Wonder – now 75 – sang like it was still the 1970s, his voice raspy one minute, angelic the next. Anyone
Grade: B+ There’s quite a lot to dislike about Wet Leg, even aside from their stupid name. The entirety of their lyrical canon, for starters – vapid and petulant millennial inanities, 50 per cent performative braggadocio, 50 per cent adolescent carping. Or there’s the commodification of their sexualities: they’ve traded up to being bi, just
The Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou started off as YouTubers known for their comically violent shorts – Ronald McDonald Chicken Store Massacre (2014) has accrued 67 million views. They then raised the money to make their first feature. This was the quietly disquieting Talk To Me (2022), which cost $4.5 million and made $92
What to make of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which this week made its British debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall? The bare facts indicate that it’s a ‘crazy shit’ performance group of some repute, the brainchild of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, established 19 years ago, based in New York, its weird name taken
Grade: A– There’s a classic trajectory for British composers: a five-decade evolution from Angry Young Man to Pillar of the Establishment. Right now, you can watch it happening in real time to Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage – inevitably, unwittingly, falling unto the pattern established by Sir Arthur Bliss, who shocked critics in the 1920s
Like spider plants and exotic cats, certain artists are best suited to the great indoors. Lana Del Rey, for instance, proves the point that just because you can sell enough tickets to fill a stadium doesn’t mean you should necessarily perform in one. Some music blossoms in the sun, some ripens in the shadows. Billie
The memory of Nye Bevan is being honoured at the National Theatre. Having made his name as a Marxist firebrand, Nye was quick to take advantage of the privileges enjoyed by the governing classes whom he affected to despise. He entered parliament in 1929 and began to hang around the Commons bar plying female MPs
On the continent this summer, new operas from two of Britain’s most important composers. Oliver Leith likes guns, animals and dissolving sickly sweet sounds in acid baths of microtonality. In one recent orchestral work, the conductor becomes a pistol-wielding madman; his next, Garland, a vast pageant premiering on 18 September at Bold Tendencies, Peckham, sees
My father took us to the cinema (Odeon, Leicester Square) once a year at Christmas and in 1978 the film was Superman. I remember it vividly, and I remember it as thrilling, but hadn’t seen it since so I rewatched it and it is everything a superhero movie should be, the gold standard. It has
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – and opera directors really, really wish they didn’t. The problem is particularly acute if, like the Royal Opera’s Oliver Mears, you believe in staging Handel’s concert works as if they were operas. Broadly speaking, Handel’s oratorios affirm the moral and political consensus of
We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many areas of life. Football supporters, for example, are not ‘customers’; they are supporters. They are at the club before a new owner arrives, they remain there after that owner leaves. In the meantime, they do
Evita, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a catwalk version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The actors perform on the steps of a football stadium where they race through an effortful series of dance routines accompanied by flashy lights and thumping tunes. It’s more a drama-school showcase than an epic human tragedy. There are no
There is no higher calling than making great pop music, and no mechanism by which such an achievement can be faked or fudged. No lofty exposition, no pleading discourse, no mitigating circumstance, no ifs, buts or boo-hoo back story can bend a piece of so-so music into a great pop song. We simply know one
Everyone who wasn’t at Glastonbury this year knows exactly what it was like: a seething mass of hatred and rabid leftiness, characterised by an angry punk duo named Bob Vylan calling for the death of the IDF. But that’s just the tabloid hysteria talking – betraying also maybe a hint of envy towards those lucky
It’s all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a quick way of pulling in the punters, but the trick clearly does the business. Sadler’s Wells was pretty well full on the night I saw Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, a concept album that has endured several
King Arkel, in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy’s score is so luminous that it’s easy to forget just how dark it supposedly is, this mythical realm of Allemonde – even despite the libretto’s references to gloomy caves, shadowy castles and forests that block out
In middle age Alfred Brendel looked disconcertingly like Eric Morecambe – but, unlike the comedian in his legendary encounter with André Previn, he played all the right notes in the right order. OK, so perhaps I’m selling the maestro a bit short: I do think Brendel, who died on 17 June at the age of
‘So suburban!’ That’s Prince Orlofsky’s catchphrase in the Grange Festival’s new production of Die Fledermaus, and he gets a lot of wear out of it. You couldn’t really describe the Grange Festival as suburban – it’s hard to imagine a corner of the Home Counties that’s more remote from urban civilisation. No, if the vibe
If, as is said, there are only seven basic narratives in human storytelling, then there should be an addendum. In rock and pop there is only one: the dizzying rise, the imperial period, the fall from grace (either commercial or ethical, sometimes both), and the noble return (historically prefigured with a glossy music mag cover
Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. But it’s eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows where Cillian
Grade: B+ These are gloomy days, so here’s a burst of melody and colour to cheer you up. Back in the LP era it wasn’t unusual for classical recordings to be put together like a concert that you might actually want to hear: a sequence of works by different but complementary composers, offering the possibility
For bands of a certain vintage, the art of keeping the show on the road involves a tightly choreographed dance between past and present, old and new, then and now. It’s not a one-way transaction: there should be some recognition that the people you are playing to have also evolved since the glory years of
These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang’s 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn’t dead when he started, then she certainly was
Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running scared and gripped by dismally risk-averse and short-termist attitudes. Free from the deadening metrics of diversity quotas and targeted outcomes, smaller more independent enterprises – London City Ballet and New English Ballet Theatre among them