Love, loss and laughter are potent and enduring in composer William Finn’s (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) Elegies. Based around the importance of community, Elegies is a song cycle, namely a series of songs that hang together thematically, rather than through a narrative thread. Having said that, attendees at a regular, all male…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 28 May 2021. Reprise sees Moby revisiting and re-imagining musical highlights from his past. Together with the Budapest Art Orchestra, he has re-envisioned some of his most recognizable rave classics and anthems with new arrangements for orchestra and acoustic…
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is a fascinating documentary that lifts the lid on a woman with a famous name who didn’t play by the rules. It reveals she loved art and sex, not necessarily in that order. Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim, who lived from August 26th, 1898 to December 23th, 1979 was not only ahead of…
Katherine Kovacic’s Alex Clayton series (all two books of them so far…) could be used as a teaching tool for aspiring Australian crime novelists on achieving balance between personal backstory and plot, and how to craft a realistic strong female lead character, because they are both extremely good examples of that and much more. There’s…
Sally Hepworth’s latest novel, The Mother’s Promise, should come with a “Tissues needed” warning. I cried. More than once. Chances are you will, too. Here’s the blurb: The bestselling author of The Secrets of Midwives delivers her most powerful novel yet. Alice and her daughter Zoe have been a team of two all their lives. With no family…
We know that writer and director Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan) likes pushing the envelope, but with Mother! he goes way beyond the pale. Jennifer Lawrence plays a young woman deeply in love with a significantly older man, her husband Javier Bardem, a poet with a severe case of writer’s block. He once wrote a best…
There is excess, and then there is The Fate of the Furious, the eighth incarnation of one of the world’s most successful movie franchises. In short, this is stunt heaven, with a surfeit of fast cars in exotic locales (all of which are beautiful to behold) and fiery explosions. As we keep getting told from…
Performances worth of Academy Award nominations highlight a politically complex drama reminiscent of All the President’s Men. Foremost among them are Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford, with Noni Hazlehurst also showing the way in a small but telling scene. Written and directed by James Vanderbilt (The Amazing Spider-Man), who makes his directorial debut, Truth is…
Until we heard it, FUZZ was a band we didn’t know that we needed. With their debut self-titled album, high school friends Ty Segall (drums, vocals), Charles Mootheart (guitar), and Roland Cosio (bass) poured hot and heavy with their worship of the Big Muff Pi and other fuzz/distortion devices, their homework of bands such as…
Caroline Lee takes the stage as June, a woman of a certain age who hasn’t spoken to another person in more than a year. So, over that period – apart from accidentally speaking out aloud – she has lived in silence. Now June is taking us, the audience, into her confidence to break the drought and explain…
