Entertainment
My fair lady
- Wednesday, 19 June 2013
“I love meeting people. I was born to do this,” says Lesley Garrett. Britain’s best loved soprano isn’t talking about her latest opera, West End musical or album but entertaining holiday makers at a Warner’s break at Nidd Hall resort in North Yorkshire later this year.
For years, Lesley has been on a mission to single-handedly throw open the doors of concert halls, blow off all the dusty elitism and snobbery and take opera to the streets. Unwittingly, in the process, the feisty, down to earth, Yorkshire lass with a belting voice has won the hearts of the nation. “I’m the diva next door!” she laughs.
Robert Tanitch reviews Sweet Bird of Youth at The Old Vic
- Wednesday, 19 June 2013
The most popular form of theatre has always been melodrama. Tennessee Williams, unashamedly theatrical, was a master of the genre in the mid-20th century and never afraid to go right over the top. His mother once boasted that there was no perversion her son had not written about.
Sweet Bird of Youth is about "the enemy, time, in us all" and the futile attempts of two washed-up monsters to retain their youth. Alexandra del Lago, an ageing Hollywood star, well past her sell-by-date, on drugs and in constant need of alcohol and oxygen, books into a hotel on the Gulf Coast under the name of Princess Kosmonoplis.
Joyce Glasser reviews Thérèse Desqueyroux
- Monday, 17 June 2013
Even if Claude Miller’s last film, an adaptation of François Mauriac’s French novel, Thérèse Desqueyroux, is far from his best, it still bears the traces of the great director’s style and preoccupation with crime and intrigue, dark family secrets, quests for freedom and secular humanity.
Miller, who died in April, age 70 after a long illness, did not live to see the release of Thérèse Desqueyroux, but it’s gratifying to know that he was making the films he wanted to up until his death.
Joyce Glasser reviews Stuck In Love
- Monday, 17 June 2013
Stuck in Love is, like many American independent films, about a family in crisis, although the crisis is, curiously, never related to money and seldom related to health. Easy to watch, and entertaining, Writer/Director Josh Boone’s debut feature has some funny moments and credible performances but never gives us a reason to care about what happens.
Substituting sentimentality a melodrama for more appropriate emotion and struggling to find a real conflict, it thinks it is more touching and insightful than it actually is.
The first thing to notice about Stuck in Love is that it is yet another American film where the family home is a beautiful , sprawling clapperboard house on the edge of a body of water; usually a lake, but in this case, the ocean. The house isn’t quite as luxurious as Diane Keaton’s in Something’s Gotta Give, but the setting is similar.
Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs
- Monday, 17 June 2013
GREAT GATSBY (Paramount). Rich girls don’t marry poor boys. I thought I would catch up with the 1974 Jack Layton/Robert Redford version of Scott Fitzgerald’s account of the not-so-beautiful people in the Jazz Age, endlessly partying, endlessly dancing.
ZERO DARK THIRTY (Universal). Director Kathryn Bigelow follows up The Locker Room with an intellectual thriller, a brutal and vivid semi-documentary account of the CIA’s efforts to find and kill Osma Bin Laden. Based on actual events, including torture of detainees, it does not always make for comfortable viewing.
Kisses on a Postcard - A tale of wartime childhood evacuation
- Monday, 17 June 2013
This is a compelling and uplifting memoir of two young evacuees growing up in the countryside during the Second World War ‘When you get there,' our mum said, 'you find out your new address and you write it on the card. Then you post it at once.
"Now, the code. Our secret code ... You know how to write a kiss? Well, put one kiss if it's horrible and I'll come straight there and bring you back home. You put two kisses if it's all right. And three kisses if it's really nice. D'you see? Then I'll know'
Robert Tanitch reviews Bracken Moor at Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, London
- Monday, 17 June 2013
Alexi Kaye Campbell’s drama, directed by Polly Teale, a joint production between Tricycle Theatre and Shared Experience, is never as good as you initially think it is going to be.
Bracken Moor is set in a dark and gloomy mansion in Yorkshire during the economic crisis of 1937 and is a mixture of ghost story and socialist tract which criticizes “the way we are living and the social structures we have adapted.”
Robert Tanitch reviews The Amen Corner at National Theatre/Olivier
- Monday, 17 June 2013
James Baldwin (1924-1987), was a Pentecostal Harlem preacher at the young age of 14 and a popular one. He had a gift for rhetoric. His play, which deserves to be better known, is rooted in his early struggles and loss of faith. He wrote it because he wanted to shake blacks up and white people, too, at the same time. He is compassionate, angry and witty.
Baldwin did not criticize true religion as comfort for black people. What he criticized was the abuse of false faith as a means of hiding from the realities of life. He argued that the squalor and vice in Harlem were not symptoms of spiritual poverty but of racism. The churches were a shelter for the helpless, the hypocritical and the frightened.
Joyce Glasser reviews Admission
- Friday, 14 June 2013
Being a fan of comedienne Tina Fay (Date Night, Baby Mama, TV’s 30 Rock) and having gone through the admissions process at an Ivy League American university akin to Princeton, the main setting of Paul Weitz’s (About a Boy) new film, I was looking forward to Admission.
While there is enough about the admissions process to hold a student’s interest, none of it is revelatory, while Karen Croner’s (One True Thing) script turns a potentially rich comedy/statire into a contrived, schmaltzy romcom about motherhood.
More Articles...
- Joyce Glasser reviews Summer In February
- Robert Tanitch reviews The President Has Come To See You at Royal Court
- Joyce Glasser reviews Much Ado About Nothing
- Joyce Glasser reviews Man of Steel
- Joyce Glasser reviews The Comedian
- Joyce Glasser reviews Blood
- Joyce Glasser reviews Byzantium
- Robert Tanitch reviews The Governess at Richmond Theatre, Surrey
- Robert Tanitch review Dances of Death at Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, London W11
