‘The preciousness of youth’ At the age of about 30, nostalgia really starts to kick it up a gear. If you’re over that great age, I am sure you will scoff and chuckle at this naive statement. If you’re under 30, or specifically, under 20, stop reading and go and do something foolish that you can be nostalgic about later. ...
‘Simply crafted but staggering’ Sometimes you stumble down a flight of stairs into a basement and are gobsmacked. That wasn’t meant to sound dirty. Also, technically we didn’t stumble, as my editor organised the tickets weeks in advance, and other people were there, including The Hobbit’s Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman). I’m getting sidetracked. My point (vaguely) was that the most ...
‘With a little bit of luck, we can make it through the night’ Just a little before my time, the mid-nineties UK garage scene’s pulse kept pumping. It had flooded the world of pop by the time I could walk, shake my hips and try to sneak into clubs. The period had a dark side though, wreathed in the sexualisation ...
‘Jousting comedy and dazzling sci-fi soundscapes are a little confused by odd references’ Miguel de Cervantes’s work Don Quixote is one of the most famous pieces of fiction, often lauded as the first modern novel, directly influencing Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers in 1844 and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897. Cut to 2024, in a little theatre off ...
‘They know how to whip up an audience’ Fuerza Bruta The handsome devils of circus, Argentina’s worst-kept theatrical secret and a personal love affair. Fuerza Bruta clatter back into the Roundhouse. This time inflated. Picture the scene, two young homosexuals exploring the Big Apple for the first time. It’s 2016, President Trump was clambering into the White House and Britain ...
‘The murky world of make-believe’ True crime meets kitchen sink and oh-so-Hollywood in The Marilyn Conspiracy at the Park Theatre. Writer and originator Vicki McKellar and director Guy Masterson have teamed up for a ghoulish imagination exercise around the death of peroxide blonde legend Marilyn Monroe. The date is 1962 and Monroe is reeling from a flop with The Misfits, a legal dispute ...
‘Cole Porter: master of the musical quip’ Buckle up folks, the summer blockbusters are here! Unlike the more democratic European cities that shut down theatres for June and July, here things are just heating up, and in some cases too darn hot indeed. Cole Porter: master of the musical quip has provided a winning combination for the Barbican already with ...
‘A rocky pilgrimage so far’ Whoopi Goldberg and Maggie Smith in a film about singing Nuns that grossed $231 million in 1992? Yes please said the world! Now a couple of years later we have a new interaction of the 2011 musical starring Alexandra Burke, Ruth Jones and Lemar restaged for the audiences of 2024. Grossing? I really couldn’t tell you, ...
‘Queer love stories with neither blissfully happy nor devastatingly sad endings are rare’ Like a shared advert for Spareroom and Tinder over Pride: intense chats over coffee and evenings in with a bottle of wine blur the confusing rules of sexuality, friendship, and flat sharing for two twenty-somethings. Now, I have lived with some deliciously odd humans: I think we ...
‘Whimsical, witty and wonderful’ With one of the best origin stories of any book/film/musical, everyone’s favourite personality-filled car (apart from Lightning McQueen and Herbie) soars into the New Wimbledon Theatre. The story of a magic Mercedes chassis saving a single-parent family from a child-hating fictitious Eastern European monarchy still makes little sense, but does it need to? Ian Fleming, of James ...