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Imagine... Frank Gehry: The Architect Says Why Can't I?, BBC OneWednesday, 24 June 2015
The hook for Alan Yentob's portrait of the 86-year-old architect Frank Gehry was the initiation and progress of an enormous new building in a rough portside area of Sydney, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building for the business school of the University of... Read more... |
The Motherf**ker with the Hat, National TheatreThursday, 18 June 2015
The play that lost the 2011 Tony Award to War Horse is now receiving its British debut at the very address where War Horse premiered. But such theatrical coincidences won't register in most circles as much as a title, The Motherf**ker with the Hat,... Read more... |
CD: Arthur Russell - CornMonday, 15 June 2015
The story of singer-songwriter-cellist-composer Arthur Russell is tragic and life-affirming in equal measure. A Zelig-like figure, from his corn-belt beginnings he glided through underground scenes in the 1970s and '80s, collaborating with everyone... Read more... |
Listen Up PhilipThursday, 04 June 2015
Artists can be selfish bastards. Yoko Ono didn’t pay her babysitters; Bob Dylan has frozen out nearly all his friends; Norman Mailer stabbed his wife, and William Burroughs shot his. Philp (Jason Schwartzman), the young novelist who sociopathically... Read more... |
World War Two: 1945 and the Wheelchair President, BBC FourThursday, 14 May 2015
More than an hour and a half, and not a moment too long: this moving and enlightening visual essay was a near-perfect example of broad brush modern history, enlivened by telling detail. It was a curiously intense history, written and narrated... Read more... |
Antonacci, ROHO, Pappano, Royal Opera HouseTuesday, 05 May 2015
Few conductors would think of putting Bernstein’s comic-sexy Fancy Free ballet and the orgasmatron of Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy together in a concert's second half. In fact I’ll wager, without research, that it’s never been done before. Yet as... Read more... |
Between Worlds, ENO, BarbicanSunday, 12 April 2015
Composer Tansy Davies and librettist Nick Drake’s opera Between Worlds cannot help but be a devastating tribute to the tragedy of 9/11. Yet the whole is peppered with problems that mean this result is achieved only intermittently. Davies – whose... Read more... |
DVD: The GroupTuesday, 07 April 2015
Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group inspired Candace Bushnell to write Sex and the City, a connection highlighted on this DVD of Sidney Lumet’s 1966 adaptation. Only the breezy style of the newsletter which keeps eight female friends from Vassar’s... Read more... |
theartsdesk in New York: On Kawara at the Guggenheim MuseumSunday, 05 April 2015
On a snowy day in early spring in New York, the On Kawara – Silence show at the Guggenheim is unlikely to warm you up. His date paintings, postcards, telegrams and other coldly ur-conceptual accountings spiral up those famous white Frank Lloyd... Read more... |
Bad Jews, Arts TheatreThursday, 26 March 2015
Joshua Harmon’s provocative 2012 piece is the Rocky of comedies. His evenly matched sparring partners, a pair of viscerally antagonistic cousins confined in close quarters after a familial loss, bruise, bludgeon and literally draw blood. The bonds... Read more... |
CD: Lightning Bolt - Fantasy EmpireSunday, 15 March 2015
Anyone whose attention was caught by Royal Blood’s recent explosion in popularity and who imagines the Brighton duo as rock innovators, with their bass and drum approach, may be surprised to hear that Lightning Bolt have been ploughing that... Read more... |
10 Questions for Filmmaker Desiree AkhavanTuesday, 03 March 2015
New filmmakers often suffer an unhelpful onslaught of comparisons and labels. Yet Desiree Akhavan offers so many options as to deflect all of them – counter measures against the heat-seeking missiles of media stereotyping. She’s a bisexual, an... Read more... |
