1950s
Home, I'm Darling, Duke of York's Theatre review - Katherine Parkinson rules the roostThursday, 07 February 2019
The Fifties? They were terrible: bone-cold houses where people huddled round the fireplace for heat, empty Sundays that lasted a month, drawn-out rationing, bread you could build houses with. It was all making do and mending and "grey meat, grey... Read more... |
Hough, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - film music flowsFriday, 25 January 2019
No one worried about melting icecaps and homeless penguins when Vaughan Williams wrote his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic around 70 years ago. (They do now, as a new music theatre piece by Laura Bowler to be premiered by Manchester... Read more... |
Magda Szabó: Katalin Street review - love after lifeSunday, 13 January 2019
This is a love story and a ghost story. The year is 1934 and the Held family have moved from the countryside to an elegant house on Katalin Street in Budapest. Their new neighbours are the Major (with whom Mr Held fought in the Great War) and his... Read more... |
Stan and Ollie review - a worthy double actSaturday, 12 January 2019
Stan & Ollie unfolds mostly during Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s 1953 British concert tour, when the boys were on their last legs as a comedy act – Hardy was physically spent – but still showing flashes of their old genius. The lure of the tour... Read more... |
The Sound of Movie Musicals with Neil Brand, BBC Four review - genius of song and danceSaturday, 22 December 2018
The movie musical: money making or true art – or both? This was a programme to sing along to, in the company of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. In this second instalment of Neil Brand’s brilliant three-part history, he... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Invention for DestructionTuesday, 20 November 2018
Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction (Vynález zkázy) was, for many years, his best-known film in the West, dubbed into English three years after its 1958 premiere as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne by an enterprising Hollywood producer. Both... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Jazz on a Summer's DaySunday, 11 November 2018
When Jazz on a Summer's Day was first seen in American cinemas in March 1960, it showed that seeing popular music live could be a leisure activity akin to watching high-end sports. Indeed, director Bert Stern intercut the musical performances he... Read more... |
Imagine... Becoming Cary Grant, BBC One review - contemplative portrait of a starWednesday, 31 October 2018
Mark Kidel has made a beautiful, ethereal film projecting his version of Cary Grant and as such it’s destined to be picked over by the actor’s legions of fans, each of whom will have a different version. But what would the man himself have thought... Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, British Youth Opera review - perfect poise in slippery StravinskyFriday, 07 September 2018
So it's been sellouts for half-baked if well-cast productions of The Rake's Progress and now Britten's Paul Bunyan at Wilton's Music Hall, while British Youth Opera's classy Stravinsky in the admittedly larger Peacock Theatre, several hundred yards... Read more... |
Cold War review - a gorgeous and mesmerising romanceWednesday, 29 August 2018
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... Read more... |
The King review - the myth behind the manSaturday, 25 August 2018
The most famous face in musical history, and perhaps the instigator of modern culture as we know it; he truly was the King. But for a documentary focused on such an icon, The King touches very little on Elvis Presley the man. This is not another... Read more... |
Vanessa, Glyndebourne review - blowsy histrionics and a great finaleMonday, 06 August 2018
"Sounds like an opera by Handel," said a friend when I told him that I was going to see Vanessa at Glyndebourne. Possible – the name first appeared in print as "invented" by Jonathan Swift in 1723 – had Handel not stuck to mythological and Biblical... Read more... |
