The Telegraph: “I trudged to this production with all the enthusiasm of a schoolboy making his way to a double maths lesson on a dank Monday morning.
One of the peculiarities of my job is that you are sometimes required to see the same play twice in close proximity, and it was only last week that I endured Stephen Unwin’s punishingly dour production of Ghosts (1881) at the Rose Theatre in Kingston. The idea of a second dose of a work that is grim even by Ibsen’s demanding standards felt almost unendurable.Read More »
ABBA: The Movie is a 1977 film about the pop group ABBA’s Australian tour. It was directed by Lasse Hallström, who directed most of the group’s videos. The film has become a cult film among ABBA fans. Its release coincided with the release of ABBA: The Album, the group’s fifth studio album, and features many songs from that album as well as many of their earlier hits, and one, “Get on the Carousel”, unavailable anywhere else.Read More »
Quote: This modern-dress studio production is “not your parents’ Don Giovanni” – the very opening shots, depicting a real New York slum full of rundown buildings, dead rats and garbage-covered snow, make that clear. Set in the South Bronx, this Giovanni strips the characters of their social statuses, keeps humor to the barest minimum, and brings forth loudly and clearly all the darkness that normally only simmers below the opera’s surface. Anna is an obvious rape victim who turns to heroin to escape from her trauma. Masetto does indeed beat Zerlina. And Giovanni and Leporello, innately “not so different,” are here portrayed as identical African American twins – a nearly interchangeable pair of streetwise, leather-clad, coke-snorting, gun-wielding hoods. Ensembles are staged as interpretive dances, and the finale is a hodgepodge of surreal horror, with a green-faced Commendatore, a somber little girl who lures pedophile Giovanni toward his doom, and bare-chested “demons,” both male and female, rising from the pavement.Read More »
Berlin, Deutschlandhalle, November 20 th 1971. Kinski emerges into a lone spotlight on an empty stage. Shoulder length hair, plain jeans, a shirt with flower and polka dot patterns. No set, no stage effects, no costume. By reciting his own version of the New Testament’s “Jesus Christ Saviour”, he realizes a project well over 10 years in the making.
It is the time of the Hippie movement, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” is celebrating a sensational success in Germany as well. It is also a time of nonviolent resistance.Read More »
Synopsis Extraordinary things always happen when unexpected. During the 18 months Justice spent touring, “extraordinary” didn’t necessarily mean “amazing”, or “great”, (though it sometimes did) but “surreal”, “weird”, “horrendous”, “fascinating”, “paranormal”, etc. To cut a long story short, it means that without anyone to film you twenty-four/seven, no one will believe or get the essence of every moment you’d like to tell them about. So as Justice were about to tour the USA for the second time, multi-awarded directors and intimate friends of the band Romain Gavras and So-Me taped every second of that 3 week tour that looks like it lasted 3 years. This documentary isn’t a report of a Justice live show (the audio CD is here for that), but is all about the extraordinary things that can happen when a bunch of frogs get dropped in dreamy America.Read More »
An evening-long collaborative work between Tharp and David Byrne (of The Talking Heads), The Catherine Wheel is a continuous piece of dance/theater that makes its way toward a firework-like finale [see: The Golden Section] through episodes presenting the disintegration of the nuclear family, while ruminating on the detonation of nuclear weapons. The dance ensemble becomes a cast of specifically defined characters: The Leader and The Chorus; The Mother; The Father; The Sister; The Brother; The Maid; The Pet; and The Poet. A pineapple prop plays a part as its natural self and as its symbolic self, as a nickname for explosive devices.Read More »
More than 20 contemporary North American poets recite, sing, and perform their work. Early in the film, Charles Bukowski talks about the energy of poets and of a poem. These poets are the children of Walt Whitman and of Charles Olson, incantatory and oratorical, radical, sometimes incorporating contemporary political imagery. Black Mountain poets, the Beats, minimalists like John Cage, the wordless Four Horsemen, Tom Waits, and others capture aspects of poets as troubadours.Read More »
A profound, powerful and yet unfinished opera, Moses und Aron ends with an admission of defeat: “”O word, thou Word that I lack!””, Moses’ last cry, is also the last phrase the composer has been able to set to music. Recounting the story of Moses, who has experienced the immensity of God, and of Aron, who tries to speak of it; casting doubt, with dodecaphonism, upon the adequacy of tonal and traditional musical language; Moses und Aron questions the possibility of a True Speech. Following in their wanderings the children of Israel, a stateless people lost in the desert and looking for signs and images, Moses un Aron symbolizes the challenges encountered by a community looking for her own identity, torn between spiritual ideal and material needs. Read More »
Quote: Filmed on the rooftops of lower Manhattan, this performance film features the original Last Poets performing 28 numbers adapted from their legendary Concept-East Poetry appearance at New York’s Paperback Theater in 1969. Described as “a conspiracy of ritual, street theater, soul music and cinema.”Read More »
