There was something vaguely disappointing about seeing Abel Tesfaye appear on stage at London’s Electric Ballroom. A wide-eyed, puffa-jacket-clad figure isn’t what you expect from his enigmatic alter-ego ‘The Weeknd’ — it seemed incongruous that we should watch this self-styled introvert performing to an audience. At 23 years old, Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd) has released
Caitlin Rose, Caitlin Rose, Caitlin Rose. I’d feel awkward admitting that I’m rather obsessed with this Nashville chanteuse, were it not for a mitigating truth: you should be, too. Her debut album Own Side Now, released in 2010, was proof enough of her sweltering talent. And now we have a follow-up, The Stand-In, that’s superior
William Turnbull died last year. And if his name is not as familiar as those of his friends Giacometti and Paolozzi, it should be: an exhibition at Chatsworth in Derbyshire may help put this right. Turnbull was born in Dundee in 1922; he left school at 15, and went to work as an illustrator for
A room filled with glowing fog; shadowy figures among glittering LEDs and warm ‘breathing’ columns of light. Welcome to the trip that is Light Show (until 28 April), the Hayward Gallery’s latest exhibition exploring how artists have used the medium of artificial light over the past five decades. With side effects of disorientation, slight panic
It takes a special sort of talent to turn a good act into a great one, and without John Ammonds, who died last month, aged 88, it’s quite possible that today’s couch potatoes never would have heard of Morecambe & Wise. As their BBC producer, he transformed them from jobbing comics into a national institution.
Whenever the possibility of a film version of a difficult or complex book is mooted, speculation mounts about how it will be done. Usually at this point some dull spark will pipe up that some novels are simply ‘unfilmable’ (though such reservations are sometimes shared by the authors of the novels in question: David Mitchell
Twenty-five years ago I went to St James’s Palace to ask the Prince of Wales if he would open the new Design Museum. Before us was the model of the building, an elegant, austere, uncompromised white box that was very much along Bauhaus lines. We knew that ‘modern’ no longer meant ‘of-the-moment’ but had become
The Room is an awful film. Plot lines are picked up and forgotten in seconds, stock footage is repeated continuously, actors and names change without explanation, doors are never closed and every photo frame contains a picture of a spoon. Even the second (absurd) sex scene is just a repeat with different music. But that
Last week, Sergei Polunin’s powerful entrance in Marguerite and Armand was saluted with a wave of electrically charged silence: not a cough, not a sound, all eyes glued to the stage. Whether viewers held their breath because they were waiting to see if the star who stormed out of the Royal Ballet still had it,
Quite what it was that was so spellbinding about a quartet of middle-aged German blokes in skintight bodysuits standing at neon-lit consoles is difficult to articulate. They didn’t even seem to be doing very much up there on stage. But the audience of 1,000 for round two of Kraftwerk’s eight-night retrospective in Tate Modern’s Turbine
At first glance, Holy Motors is all about one astonishing performance — or several, depending on how you look at it. The performance in question is by Denis Lavant, who plays M. Oscar, a blank page of a man who scribbles over himself with make-up and wigs to portray a succession of different characters. At
If you want to know what’s so great about John Cranko’s choreography, look at the opening phrase of the final duet in Onegin (1965). The male dancer encircles the ballerina in an embrace that is not reciprocated, and then falls at her feet; she lunges forward to walk away from him, but her motion is
Merrily We Roll Along (Menier Chocolate Factory, until 9 March) lets you escape the winter cold to a showbiz party in a Bel Air beach house. Still, despite its summery setting, Stephen Sondheim’s musical has a stock-taking feel that suits it to a run at the changing of the years. ‘How did you get to
It was dinner at a prize-winning hotel in Burgundy. I looked, stupefied, at an awkward arrangement of trapezoidal plates, unaccommodating to food and unergonomic to both eater and plongeur. There was a water glass of triangular section and silly cutlery that would bring even Philippe Starck’s most empurpled morphological fantasies into the arena of commonsense.
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross published The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century five years ago, earning himself the Guardian First Book Award and a finalist citation for the Pulitzer Prize. Now London’s Southbank Centre is turning the book into a year of concerts, talks, film screenings, exhibitions and even a three-part
When John Kelly was transported from Tipperary to Tasmania in 1841, for stealing pigs, he couldn’t have imagined that 170 years later there’d be an exhibition of paintings of one of his offspring at Dublin’s plush Museum of Modern Art (until 27 January). Yet here he is, Ned, the 19th-century Oz-born bushranger and cop-killer, as
The Blow family has had its disasters. There has been madness, murder and suicides. But before those mishaps there was a good man, my grandfather Detmar Blow. In the 1900s he was at his height as a young architect. His practice was large. Larger, I was told by Sir Edwin Lutyens’s daughter, Mary, than that
If I wake up at too rude an hour to get up — before four o’clock, let’s say — Through the Night is my reward: I switch on the radio and find it to be inhabited not by humans but by music. This six-hour programme, which runs every night on Radio 3 from half-past 12
Pontius Pilate is deciding the fate of Ha-Notsri (aka Jesus) in Herod’s palace. In Stalin’s Moscow, meanwhile, the Devil (aka Woland) stalks the streets. One man, the Master (aka Mikhail Bulgakov), can reconcile these opposing cosmic forces. But he is languishing in a mental asylum. Bulgakov’s Manichaean acid trip avant la lettre, The Master and
While most theatres brace themselves for the annual invasion of prancing Nutcrackers and flying snowmen, Sadler’s Wells offers something that is mercifully not as sugary. Never-ending love and magic kisses might be at the core of Matthew Bourne’s long-awaited take on Sleeping Beauty — aptly subtitled ‘ A Gothic Romance’ — but there are also