Giles Terera claims Ain’t Nothin’ But blues bar denied group of actors entry because they were black
A star of the hit musical Hamilton has accused a Soho bar of racial profiling, claiming that it denied a group of actors entry because they were black.
Giles Terera said the Ain’t Nothin’ But blues bar had allowed 10 white people next to them to enter, but that the group of eight black actors were turned away.
Continue reading...Theatre director also had career in medicine and was member of Beyond the Fringe
Sir Jonathan Miller, the writer, theatre and opera director, and member of the Beyond the Fringe comedy team, has died at the age of 85.
In a statement his family said Miller died “peacefully at home following a long battle with Alzheimer’s”.
Continue reading...Crucible, Sheffield
Tobi Bamtefa gives a swaggering, thundering performance as the dictator Idi Amin, but this adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel is stodgy and plodding
Swaggering and lumbering, fickle and childish, Tobi Bamtefa thunders between laughter and malice as the former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in this adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel, directed by Gbolahan Obisesan. The president’s greed and gruesome misogyny glisten like beads of sweat under the weight of his charm and bravado. But even this confident lead performance can’t rescue a stodgy, overwritten script and humdrum production in which tensions fizzle, plot holes reign and actions lack consequence.
Daniel Portman plays Nicholas Garrigan, a fresh-faced Scottish doctor thrown into the position of Amin’s personal physician. A chirpy, stuttering romantic, he chooses to see the new president as a beacon of hope for the country. But Garrigan’s intentions are never clear. With Amin’s charm so immediately overshadowed by his brutality in Steve Waters’ altered timeline, we don’t understand why the wilfully ignorant and quickly complicit doctor is so enamoured with the president; he has to turn a blind eye so fast he’s left spinning on the spot for the rest of the show. With his ethics bludgeoned too soon, his cowardice is amplified and our sympathy for him is significantly reduced.
Continue reading...Lin Hwai-min has spent 46 years tackling revolt, repression and rice in his fast-changing homeland. Now he is handing over his dance-theatre juggernaut to a former slipper seller
It’s a hot, humid evening and I’m sitting on the ground with around 50,000 other people, all about to watch Cloud Gate Dance Theatre give its annual outdoor performance in Taipei. The atmosphere in Liberty Plaza is extraordinary. I can’t think of another dance company in the world that could draw so large and so festive a crowd. Most of the audience have brought picnics, many enduring a day of rainstorms to bag a position close to the stage. Yet, although this is a special performance – one of the last before Cloud Gate’s founding director Lin Hwai-min steps down – such devotion has been normal for the company almost since it was formed.
Cloud Gate was named as the outstanding company at the British National Dance awards last year and is a headline attraction of the new Sadler’s Wells season. Lin’s success in turning a small experimental dance company into a national icon and international brand is a remarkable story. Now 71, with a fierce energy and a huge crinkled smile, Lin acknowledges that he had almost no experience of professional dance when he staged his first programme back in 1973, and discovered that he’d sold 3,000 tickets for just two shows. “I almost had a nervous breakdown,” he says. “I thought, ‘My god, now I have to learn how to choreograph.’”
Continue reading...From apocalyptic standup Frankie Boyle to the many hilarious faces of Tina Fey, Steve Coogan, Sharon Horgan and Kristen Wiig, we present the funniest comics of the era
Continue reading...As the dyspeptic old-school entertainer embarks on a tour, his creator Steve Delaney reflects on dedicating his life to one character
Comedy has its careerists: thrusting tyros zeroing in on the fame, the TV gigs, the movie roles. But there are other, more circuitous routes to the top. The fictional Count Arthur Strong certainly took one, via the dog days of vaudeville and bit parts in Hammer horrors. His creator Steve Delaney took one too, meandering from drama school to a carpentry career to the slow gestation of his alter ego, away from the circuit’s bright lights.
The Count is a star now; his sitcom – co-written with Graham Linehan – ran for three series to 2017. But he was once an oddity on the Edinburgh fringe, where I started watching him at the turn of the century – an experience never to be forgotten, for various reasons. Yes, this blithering, dyspeptic old-school entertainer was a creation of near-genius, and Delaney’s blood vessel-busting performance a spectacle to behold. But – wow! – those early shows could be gruelling. The joke was in Arthur’s frustration and confusion, as his own waning powers (of memory, movement, syntax) thwarted this or that overreaching set piece. Often, Delaney took that joke to painful, patience-fraying extremes.
Continue reading...Mark Lewisohn knows the Fab Four better than they knew themselves. The expert’s tapes of their tense final meetings shed new light on Abbey Road – and inspired a new stage show
The Beatles weren’t a group much given to squabbling, says Mark Lewisohn, who probably knows more about them than they knew about themselves. But then he plays me the tape of a meeting held 50 years ago this month – on 8 September 1969 – containing a disagreement that sheds new light on their breakup.
They’ve wrapped up the recording of Abbey Road, which would turn out to be their last studio album, and are awaiting its release in two weeks’ time. Ringo Starr is in hospital, undergoing tests for an intestinal complaint. In his absence, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison convene at Apple’s HQ in Savile Row. John has brought a portable tape recorder. He puts it on the table, switches it on and says: “Ringo – you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”
Continue reading...Standup comedian also takes aim at callout culture that sees public figures held to account by audiences
Dave Chappelle has come under fire for his latest Netflix special in which he claims he does not believe Michael Jackson sexually assaulted young boys, and makes jokes at the expense of Jackson’s accusers.
In a standup set that seemed designed to provoke precisely the backlash that it was critiquing, Chappelle took aim at a prevailing callout culture that sees celebrities being held to account by audiences and in the media for perceived or actual crimes and for the offensive things they say.
Continue reading...For performers, the fringe is a delirium-inducing month of nonstop work. They get just one day off throughout August – so they have to use it wisely…
I love my show and when you have a day off, the next day is a bit lacklustre. But I do need it because I am a queen and I deserve a rest. I’m of the “living your best life” mantra and I don’t just talk it, I walk it. I’ll have a long spa day – massage, mani, pedi, eyebrows – go for the sexiest dinner in this nice hotel on the bridge with all my girls, then get cocktails. I’m single, but I’m like Lady Gaga – she doesn’t sleep with guys when she’s writing her album because men steal her creative energy. But on my day off, I’m allowed.
Continue reading...The Enron playwright talks about retelling the murder of the KGB whistleblower, our surreal political era, and how Billie Piper helped her through dark times
Lucy Prebble operates an “elephant in the room” method when it comes to writing plays: she tries to take on the biggest overlooked ideas that shape our world.
“In theatre there is always a lot of very tasteful, refined work,” she says. “I wouldn’t be dismissive of that. But it doesn’t feel very representative of life at the moment, which feels to me quite ugly and lacking taste and unrefined. Rambunctious.”
Continue reading...Songs in the Key of Cree, Deer Woman and Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, three shows by Canada’s Indigenous artists, are presented at the Edinburgh festival
This summer, Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls revealed “staggering” rates of violence and lay the blame at “persistent and deliberate human and Indigenous rights violations and abuses” . For decades, Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing and, for decades, the problem has been ignored.
The scandal is shocking in its own terms, but for many of those affected, it stands for an even broader malaise. They see the abuse as an expression of colonialism and link it not only to the excesses of capitalism but also the resultant climate emergency; all are about taking what doesn’t belong to you.
Continue reading...Star of a string of 60s classics fell foul of Hollywood because of his temper but found a fresh lease of life in comedy, from TV’s Larry Sanders Show to the Men in Black films
Rip Torn, America’s celebrated wildman actor, has died aged 88. Torn, who had been a constant presence on stage and screen since the mid-1950s, was arguably better known for his eccentric, and occasionally violent, antics when the cameras weren’t rolling – and on one notorious occasion, when they were.
His publicist Rick Miramontez confirmed Torn died Tuesday afternoon at his home with his wife, actor Amy Wright, and daughters Katie Torn and Angelica Page by his side. No cause of death was given.
Continue reading...Park theatre, London
A mother’s fierce love lies at the heart of Tuyen Do’s nuanced portrait of a family forging a new life in the UK
A light Vietnamese dish served at a family’s restaurant? Or a sneaky spliff rolled by their unruly daughter? Double meanings lie at the heart of the intriguing Summer Rolls by Tuyen Do. It’s an intimate domestic drama, sketched with compassion and steely honesty, about a family who have left war-torn Vietnam and are struggling to forge a shared future in the safety (or is that boredom?) of Essex.
The shifting dynamics – as slippery as the language that young Mai’s parents struggle to adopt – are fascinating to observe. At the centre of the home (coolly lit by Jessica Hung Han Yun) is the mother, otherwise unnamed and played with a brittle ferocity by Linh-Dan Pham. She is the family’s fulcrum: the one who sets the tone (tense), who holds together the family sewing business (fragile), who later runs the restaurant (success!) and who still, when desperately ill, commands the family with a blazing love that is both frightening and comforting.
Continue reading...She is the go-to soprano for world leaders, royals and Broadway directors – and she even sang in elf language for Lord of the Rings. The great barrier-buster relives her biggest breaks
She sang at the inauguration of Barack Obama and at the diamond jubilee concert thrown for the Queen. She also performed at senator John McCain’s funeral and at Prince Charles’s 70th-birthday bash. Yet here’s Renée Fleming today, sitting in a dowdy London studio, eating salad from a cardboard box and feeling somewhat daunted.
“It is terrifying,” she says, of her part in the Tony-winning musical The Light in the Piazza. “There’s so much dialogue, which is not a skill I’ve practised much. But I’ve always had a voracious love of musical adventure.” Fortunately, her friend John Malkovich has given her some advice. “He told me, ‘You just have to put in the hours.’ That made me feel better.”
Continue reading...His take on Shakespeare’s tragedy tapped the zeitgeist, but Zeffirelli’s whole body of work pulsated with an irresistible camp and romanticism
Franco Zeffirelli was the mainstream maestro of high culture on screens big and small who dashingly made his international movie reputation with an exuberant and accessible adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in 1968; this had some pretty trad doublet-and-hose stuff and featured the syrupy “Love” theme composed for the film by Nino Rota which was to become notorious as the music for Simon Bates’s regular tearjerking Our Tune feature on Radio One.
But there were also muscular and athletic performances from a bright-eyed young cast, vigorous and enjoyable playing all round and bold location work. The year before, Zeffirelli had directed Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in another Shakespeare adaptation: The Taming of the Shrew: clever casting of course, but it was the honeyglow-sunlit romanticism of young love in Romeo and Juliet — not cynical middle-aged love — which caught the public imagination, tuned into the zeitgeist and gave Zeffirelli his massive hit.
Continue reading...The comedian’s life was upended in 2016 when his wife died. He discusses her role in the Golden State Killer case, the ‘shadow slog’ of grief – and the reaction to his remarriage
The sad clown. The chronic depressive comedian. It is one of the greatest cliches in showbusiness. Patton Oswalt – ebullient, life-affirming, swearing as he hurtles along the Interstate 10 highway in California – does not sound like one of those. At least, not any more.
Oswalt’s wife, the true-crime writer Michelle McNamara, died suddenly in 2016 at the age of 46. That was the second-worst day of Oswalt’s life. The worst was breaking the news to their seven-year-old daughter, Alice, the next day.
Continue reading...‘Not knowing if anyone would walk in gave me energy and inspired my powerful stance’
On a trip through Jiangxi province in south-east China two years ago, my friend and I were wandering around one of the area’s many small villages. It was tiny and empty apart from a few old men and women sitting in front of their houses.
There was a single street which all the doors of the village opened on to. One had a normal black door with a sign above it that said something like “club” or “meeting hall”. It was the only indication of it being non-residential, so I pushed it open. We found an empty theatre with two raised stages. Chairs were stacked on one and on the other was this set: two chairs and a table, draped in red fabric. I instantly knew I had to take a photograph.
Continue reading...Wild parties, stunning performances, silhouette erections and marrying Patrick Stewart twice. As the actor turns 80, friends including Derek Jacobi, Janet Suzman, Michael Sheen, Bill Condon and Stephen Fry pay tribute
Ian has been been very important in my life, even before we became good friends. When I was a young teen I remember watching Walter on the TV and being hugely affected by it. Then at Rada in the early 90s, I finally saw him live, in Richard III at the National. I was blown away. I remember him doing the opening speech while lighting a cigarette one-handed. It was brilliant, so understated. It exemplified his mastery – and his work ethic. To do something so difficult and complicated and make it look so easy. Ian has an innate sense of theatrical audacity, something I think he shares with Olivier. They both did things that would make the audience gasp self-consciously.
Continue reading...The death of the SNL star 30 years ago robbed the industry of one its finest voices – but not before she had blazed a trail for women such as Tina Fey to follow
There is no shortage of excellent critical writing about the US comedy scene in the 80s, and Nick de Semlyen’s Wild and Crazy Guys, which is published in the UK next month, is a terrific contribution to the genre. De Semlyen frames his book by telling the stories of the men who forged that world, most of whom – including Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd – emerged from the comedy training ground of Saturday Night Live. But what De Semlyen’s book also shows is that this scene was dominated by men. Yet that wasn’t supposed to be the case.
This month is the 30th anniversary of the death of Gilda Radner, one of the original cast members of SNL, alongside Chase, Belushi, Aykroyd and others. Although she is comparatively little known today outside comedy circles, back then she was widely assumed to be the future megastar of that group. With her sharp parodies of celebrities and her skill at satirising her own femininity and neuroses, she set the mould for modern female comedians. Without Radner, it is hard to imagine the existence of many of the most beloved comic characters of the past 30 years, from Elaine Benes in Seinfeld to Liz Lemon in 30 Rock.
Continue reading...Jimmy Carr and Katy Brand among those to pay public respect to ‘fearless’ comic who fell suddenly ill during Bicester gig
Tributes have been paid to the anarchic comedian Ian Cognito, who died on stage during a gig on Thursday night. The cult standup was performing at the Lone Wolf Comedy Club night at the Atic bar in Bicester when he fell ill and took a seat. Some members of the audience reportedly thought that it was part of the act but paramedics were called to the venue and he was pronounced dead.
Katy Brand was among those to pay homage to Cognito, a Time Out comedy award-winner who was known as “Cogs” on the circuit. “I hung with him a good few times in the past,” she said. “He was always fascinating and hilarious company. RIP Cogs.” Paul Sinha said he had “deeply envied” Cognito’s fearlessness, calling him “a gentleman – a terrifying gentleman”. Luisa Omielan said he was “as epic as his reputation. Rebellious and brilliant.”
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