Reviews
The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Vaudeville, London
Aspects of Love, Menier Chocolate Factory, London
The Critic/The Real Inspector Hound, Minerva, Chichester
The Hollywood star engages auto-pilot in a lame Neil Simon revival
Inside Reviews
Mikhailovsky Ballet, Coliseum, London
The Rude Mechanicals, Little Horsted School Field, east Sussex
Sunday, 18 July 2010
The Russians are coming – time to take to the wing
I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
Friday, 16 July 2010
The original 1995 production of John Adams's Los Angeles earthquake musical, which the composer describes as "a polyphonic love story in the style of a Shakespeare comedy", visited the Edinburgh Festival, where it looked decidedly skinny in the wake of the composer's two previous grand operas, Nixon in China, which premiered in 1987, and The Death of Klinghoffer, from 1991.
Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Shakespeare's Globe, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
Friday, 16 July 2010
During an opening-night downpour, Roger Allam's Falstaff suddenly segued into "Blow winds, and crack your cheeks..." The audience loved this, almost as much as they loved Doll Tearsheet vomiting over them a few minutes later (well, she has been drinking "too much canaries").
Political Mother, Sadler's Wells, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
Friday, 16 July 2010
This first full-length work by Hofesh Shechter is driven by the beat. Dancers lope and stamp through folk-inflected steps, picked out by spotlights or vanishing into blackness. Shechter adds winding Eastern lines, thunderous drums and electric guitar, but it's the drumbeat that powers this dance.
The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Vaudeville Theatre, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Thursday, 15 July 2010
Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue is a bleak and mostly cheerless entertainment. The argument for reviving it in London – apart from the opportunity of seeing Jeff Goldblum and Mercedes Ruehl in their prime and on blistering, sardonic form – must reside in the picture it paints of Manhattan on the skids and falling apart at the seams.
Swan Lake, Coliseum, London (Rated 2/ 5 )
Thursday, 15 July 2010
The Mikhailovsky Ballet opens its London season with a shaky Swan Lake. The company, based at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St Petersburg, is a strange mixture of ambition and weakness. The orchestra is impressive, the corps well-drilled – but there's some shockingly weak dancing from soloists, with a general lack of pace and atmosphere.
The Railway Children, Waterloo Station Theatre, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
You might wander on to Waterloo Station looking for the next train to Woking and find yourself hurtling back in time to an Edwardian country station in Yorkshire, with three children in petticoats and a tweed suit waving at an Old Gentleman on the "down" train back to the capital. And instead of boarding a modern commuter diesel, you can fantasise once more about Jenny Agutter as the teenage nearly-woman and Bernard Cribbins as the station master, stepping their way through a north-and-south class minefield in the 1970 movie.
The Real Inspector Hound/The Critic, Minerva Theatre, Chichester (Rated 3/ 5 )
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
This pairing of one-act plays about the vicarious participation of critics in the theatre business was last seen on the vast Olivier stage 25 years ago; it works much better in the compact Minerva, though Jonathan Church and Sean Foley's joint production seems over-anxious to be funny.
First Night: The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Vaudeville Theatre, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Masterclass of comic acting fails to sustain the dramatic energy
Aftermath, Old Vic Tunnels, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
One of the most impressive "verbatim" dramas of the last few years was The Exonerated, which aired the plight of six people wrongfully convicted of murder, and made arguments against the death penalty sound irrefutable.
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FIVE BEST PLAYS
Sucker Punch
(Royal Court, London)
The auditorium is spectacularly transformed into a boxing arena for Roy Williams’s play, which takes place in a south London gym to the backdrop of the 1980s race riots and is brilliantly staged by Sacha Wares.
(020-7565 5000) to 31 Jul
Blood Brothers
(Phoenix Theatre, London)
It can be dangerous to parachute a pop star into a much-loved musical, but Mel C, the Spice Girl who could sing, is brilliant as Mrs Johnstone, the beating heart of Willy Russell’s drama and a luminous stage presence even as her character grows more careworn and downtrodden. Stephen Palfreman and Richard Reynard are quite superb as the blood brothers, too, growing up in front of our eyes from catapult-wielding tykes to responsible young men.
(0845 505 8500) to 31 Jul
The Habit of Art
(NT: Lyttelton, London)
Alan Bennett’s multi-layered, hilariously provocative new play stars Desmond Barrit as the poet W H Auden and Malcolm Sinclair as Benjamin Britten.
(020 7452 3000) to 21 Sept
That Face
(Crucible Theatre, Sheffield)
Polly Stenham’s searing debut gets its regional premiere. She writes with energetic zest, upping the ante in the second half, where relationships deepen and disintegrate and the characters’ overheated emotions are ratcheted up. Frances Barber gives a beautifully paced performance as a mother from hell, gradually revealing her monstrous, incestuous tendencies. Richard Wilson directs.
(0114 249 6000) to 24 Jul
Sweet Charity
(Theatre Royal Haymarket, London)
Tamzin Outhwaite makes up in blonde, bobbed personableness what she lacks in vocal variety as the eponymous Teflon-coated kook in this joyous revival of the musical about a dancer-for-hire.
(0845 481 1870) to 8 Jan