Culture

No one who went to see Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway residency a few years back came away disappointed because they knew what they were getting: a tightly scripted show, in which there was more speech than music. The country star Eric Church – who made his name with a single called ‘Springsteen’ – appeared to have been taking notes, for that was the model for his ‘residency’ at the Albert Hall. All that he lacked was the tight script – and Springsteen’s charm and charisma. It was, the MC told us, Church’s first time in the UK in eight years, but the place was horribly undersold, the top tier almost empty and spaces all around the stalls.

Sanity returns to the Globe. Recent modern-dress productions have failed to make use of the theatre’s virtues as a historical backdrop. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is set in the 1690s (about a century after Shakespeare’s heyday) and the script works beautifully on this spare, wooden stage. To make the groundlings feel involved, the playing area has been extended into the pit with two separate platforms for the judges and the witnesses. James Groom, as Willard the demented jailer, terrifies the crowd by striding around the arena, barking madly at anyone who gets in his way. It grabs your attention. The dashing Gavin Drea (John Proctor) looks terrific in the lead role alongside Phoebe Pryce as his mistrustful, nervy wife, Elizabeth. Both play their parts with strong Irish accents.

Grade: A+ The kids with their synths and hip producers, dragging the 1980s back: I wish they would stop. It was, in the main, an awful decade for music, the bands trite yet portentous, the stupid burbling bass guitars, hubris-stricken vocals and tinny drums. The kids retread all the dross. Yet if you were actually around and sentient in that avaricious decade, as was Saint Leonard, you could find a certain chill beauty in hidden corners. Not the New Romantics, not Japan, not SAW. Just small niches here and there of inventiveness and clever pop.

Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and I’m praying to St Jude that nobody is planning to import his dramatisation of Oscar Wilde’s downfall, premièred in Australia last year. But as the elegant craftsman, and sometimes the inspired artist, of more abstract dance, he is without doubt a great talent. The Royal Ballet’s programme of four of his shorter pieces showcases his strengths.

I have a friend who insists that had Status Quo hailed from Düsseldorf rather than Catford, they would nowadays be as critically revered as Can, Faust, Neu! and those other hallowed Teutonic pioneers of unyielding rhythm from the 1970s. Maybe so. Very probably not. Canned Heat and ZZ Top seem more reachable comparisons. But it’s true that ‘the Quo’ have been underestimated and unjustly derided throughout their six-decade career, not least by themselves. The band has happily perpetuated their position as rock and roll neanderthals: a 2007 album is titled In Search Of The Fourth Chord. There was always a little more to it than that. Personally, I have always divined a terrible sadness at the heart of their music.

Grade: A It’s clearance-sale time for the great classical labels of the 20th century. As streaming platforms drain the remaining value out of once-prestigious recorded catalogues, even B-listers are being pulled up from the vaults and remastered for one last re-release. Eleven-disc Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos edition? Walter Weller’s complete Decca recordings? Now’s your chance: everything must go! The Bavarian conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, who died in 2013, was never exactly B-list. His name always commanded respect. But in the golden age of LP collecting he was regarded as a safe pair of hands rather than a blue-chip name. Listening to a mini spate of Sawallisch re-releases suggests that we underrated him.

Young male singers won the right to be sensitive in 1963, when The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released. And in the 63 years since, being young and vulnerable and questing has been one of the great default settings. I’d say you can’t go far wrong singing sadly about your feelings, but of course you can, as the great mountain of discarded troubadours proves. Yet the size of that rejects mountain also tells us how alluring the prospect of baring one’s feelings to strangers can be. Zach Condon, who works as Beirut, and Dove Ellis are at different points on the sensitive young man spectrum. Condon is 39 for a start, so the young bit doesn’t even hold true.

Two hours of yakking about Israel. That’s all you get from Giant at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Endless wittering laced with venomous bigotry. The year is 1983 and the celebrated kiddie author, Roald Dahl, has kicked up a massive stink by denouncing Israel for attacking Lebanon in late 1982. His latest scribble, The Witches, is about to be published in America but a handful of bookshops are threatening to boycott his work. Tom and Jessie, two executives from Dahl’s publishing firm, visit him at home and beg him to withdraw his anti-Semitic rant. Dahl refuses because he loathes the Jews, hates Israel and endorses all the usual myths about Jewish control of politics and finance.

Although I doff my hat to Carlos Acosta’s BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior troupe, for a reminder of what is owed to the Ballets Russes – nothing less than the creation of a new art form – the programme it’s presenting in Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet is neither well balanced nor coherent. Between some highlights of the most familiar Fokine repertory, an extract from Nijinska’s Les Biches has oddly been inserted, and there was nothing here to suggest the fact that Massine was by far the most dominant choreographer of the Ballets Russes’s interwar era and someone indeed who had personally worked with BRB in its previous incarnation.