Category Archives: Musicals

Sarah Harding, singer with Girls Aloud, dies aged 39 from breast cancer

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Fans and figures from show business pay tribute to pop star who was diagnosed in August 2020 and wrote memoir during her illness

The pop singer and TV personality Sarah Harding, who had 21 UK Top 10 singles as a member of Girls Aloud, has died aged 39 from breast cancer.

Her mother, Marie, announced her death on Instagram, prompting a flood of tributes from fans and figures from show business. Geri Horner, the Spice Girls singer and a judge on the TV talent show that created Girls Aloud, wrote: “Rest in peace, Sarah Harding. You’ll be remembered for the light and joy you brought to the world. X”

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Casablanca Beats review – Morocco’s answer to Fame strikes a chord

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A group of talented teens push the boundaries of their religious society by putting on a concert in Nabil Ayouch’s earnest film

Franco-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch has made a likable, high-energy youth movie that could almost be called the Moroccan answer to Fame and which features that time-honoured plot device: putting on a concert.

Using nonprofessionals playing docu-fictionalised versions of themselves, Ayouch has created a drama revolving around an arts centre for young people that he himself helped to set up in the tough district of Sidi Moumen, called by someone here the Bronx of Casablanca. The school includes a special programme called the Positive School of Hip-Hop. A crowd of smart, talented teens join the class and we watch as they find out the challenges, limits and opportunities of learning self-expression through western-style rap in a Muslim society.

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‘I am very shy. It’s amazing I became a movie star’: Leslie Caron at 90 on love, art and addiction

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The legendary actor reflects on her riches-to-rags childhood, confronting depression and alcoholism – and dancing with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire

Leslie Caron and her companion, Jack, greet me at the front of their apartment. They make a well-matched couple – slight, chic, immaculately coiffured. Caron, the legendary dancer and actor, is 90 in two weeks’ time. Jack, her beloved shih tzu, is about nine.

Caron heads off to make the tea, with Sidney Bechet’s summery jazz playing in the background. I am left alone with Jack to explore the living room. It feels as if I am tunnelling through the history of 20th-century culture. Here is a photo of a pensive François Truffaut; below is a smirking Warren Beatty. The centrepiece on the wall is a huge watercolour of Caron’s great friend Christopher Isherwood, painted by his partner, Don Bachardy. To the left is Louis Armstrong, to the right Rudolf Nureyev, with whom she starred in 1977’s Valentino, and further along is Jean Renoir, who she says was like a father to her. And we have barely started.

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Music review – Sia’s tone-deaf treatment of autism

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In the singer-songwriter’s simplistic directorial debut, a cartoonish portrayal of autism clashes with a tale of addiction

For many years, Australian pop star Sia has hidden behind a fringe that covers her eyes. Using actors instead of starring in her own music videos, she has preferred not to centre herself. Yet her directorial debut appears to draw from her own experiences with addiction; its protagonist Zu (a near-bald Kate Hudson) is a recovering alcoholic. This is confusing, given that the film’s title refers to her non-speaking, neurodivergent younger sister Music (Maddie Ziegler), whose main purpose is to absolve Zu from her troubled past.

Ziegler, who appeared on the reality TV show Dance Moms, and features in some of Sia’s best-known videos (including Chandelier and Elastic Heart), is not herself on the autistic spectrum. It’s a problem, especially given the cartoonishness of her portrayal, which sees her gurning, grimacing and mumbling through her scenes. Music uses an augmentative and alternative communication device to translate rudimentary expressions such as “I am happy” and “I am sad”. Her interior world is just as simplistic, conveyed via goofy musical interludes rendered in childlike primary colours and abstract shapes. The lyrics, jaunty platitudes about Music’s “magic mind” and failing body, are offensive too. These self-consciously upbeat moments clash horribly with the wider redemption narrative.

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Dune, Bond and Top Gun returns: Films to look out for in 2021

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Daniel Craig hands in his licence to kill, Frances McDormand delivers her best ever performance, Carey Mulligan unsettles in a rape-revenge drama and Tom Cruise reaches for the skies … this year’s must-see films

Paul Greengrass’s latest film is based on the western novel by Paulette Jiles, about a girl returning to her family in 1860s Texas after being kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe. Helena Zengel plays the girl, Johanna, and Tom Hanks plays the man who must look after her: Captain Kidd, an ex-army veteran who makes a living reading aloud from newspapers to illiterate townsfolk, and who is now in the middle of a very big news story.
• Released in the UK on 1 January

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Craig Revel Horwood: ‘I’m a baddie in panto but on Strictly I’m just being honest’

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The Strictly Come Dancing judge reveals which contestant surprised him the most and why he’s looking forward to getting booed twice a day in Robin Hood

You’re a panto regular – what do you enjoy most about it?
I love live theatre – it’s where I started my career back home in Australia and I got into it as soon as I arrived in the UK. As much as I love my screen career, you simply can’t beat helping an audience to suspend their disbelief for a few hours and enjoy a shared experience live and in real time. While we all take it seriously and it’s hard work, panto is fun, festive and lets me show audiences what I can do when I’m not sitting behind my Strictly desk.

Panto has never fully been exported to Australia. When did you first see one?
The first ever pantomime I was in! Our producers, Qdos Entertainment, once called offering me the job of directing one of their productions, but due to filming commitments I couldn’t make it work. They called back five minutes later and asked me if I wanted to be in the panto instead and I jumped at the chance. It was a baptism of fire – wearing a dress, ridiculously high heels and getting booed twice a day. But I loved it, and I still do.

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The Prom review – is Ryan Murphy’s musical the first film of the Biden era?

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Taste the treacle as Nicole Kidman’s Broadway liberals rebuke a rural high school – and learn a few things about themselves

Like High School Musical on some sort of absinthe/Xanax cocktail, The Prom is an outrageous work of steroidal show tune madness, directed by the dark master himself, Ryan “Glee” Murphy, who is to jazz-hands musical theatre what Nancy Meyers is to upscale romcom or Friedrich Nietzsche to classical philology.

Meryl Streep and James Corden play Dee Dee Allen and Barry Glickman, two fading Broadway stars in trouble after their latest show closes ignominiously; it is called Eleanor!, a misjudged musical version of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt with Dee Dee in the title role and Barry as Franklin D Roosevelt. Barry also has financial difficulties (“I had to declare bankruptcy after my self-produced Notes on a Scandal”). After unhelpful press notices turn their opening night party at Sardi’s into a wake, Dee Dee and Barry find themselves drowning their sorrows with chorus-line trooper Angie (Nicole Kidman) and unemployed-actor-turned-bartender Trent (played by The Book of Mormon’s Andrew Rannells). How on earth are they going to turn their careers around?

Then Angie sees a news story trending on Twitter: a gay teenager in Indiana has been prevented by her high school from bringing a girl as a date to the prom. The teen in question is Emma (a nice performance from Jo Ellen Pellman, like a young Elisabeth Moss), her secret girlfriend is Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) and it is Alyssa’s fiercely conservative mom (Kerry Washington) who is behind the ban. Our heroic foursome declare that they will sweep into hicksville with all their enlightened values and glamorous celebrity, and campaign against this homophobia, boosting their prestige in the biz. They gatecrash a tense school meeting, declaring dramatically: “We are liberals from Broadway!”

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Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘Death suffuses my work, and part of that is growing up in New York’

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The acclaimed writer and performer on watching cat videos with ‘hot priest’ Andrew Scott, and why Hamilton reminds him of his own father

Lin-Manuel Miranda created and starred in the musical Hamilton, which premiered on Broadway in 2015. The show, about Alexander Hamilton, an American founding father, draws on hip-hop as well as more traditional musical forms, and won many awards, including 11 Tonys and the 2016 Pulitzer prize for drama. Miranda’s songs appear in the Disney animation Moana, he played Jack in Mary Poppins Returns and the balloonist Lee Scoresby in His Dark Materials, which returned to BBC One earlier this month.

How does Lee Scoresby’s character change in this series of His Dark Materials?
He goes all in on protecting Lyra. And it leads to some pretty wild places: it leads him out of the world in which he exists, to witches’ councils and beyond. In his short time with Lyra, he’s changed. He’s made the tactical decision that “my life is what it is, but this kid’s life could be better. We both were dealt a rotten pack of cards and I’m going to do what I can to make sure she’s got a brighter future.”

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An oral history of Fame: ‘We were dancing on cars in the epicentre of porn and filth!’

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It was the late director Alan Parker’s most enduring hit, capturing what it was to be young and ambitious in the hot, gritty New York of 1980. The cast and crew reflect on the acting, fighting, flirting and fallout

• ‘The most important experience of my youth’: Fame star Barry Miller on Alan Parker

Forty years ago, Alan Parker’s musical about a group of teenagers at the New York High School for the Performing Arts was released.

Originally titled Hot Lunch after one of the composer Christopher Hope’s key numbers, the film is a crowd-pleaser with a heart of ice. For all the fun and legwarmers, this isn’t some starry-eyed fantasy. Rather, its edge and pessimism make it a remarkably responsible piece of film-making, with a conclusion about the wisdom of pursuing a career in the arts that is ambivalent at best.

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Renée Fleming: ‘Plácido Domingo was so frightening. I needed help to get off the stage’

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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.”

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Doris Day, celebrated actor and singer, dies aged 97

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The star of a string of successful film musicals was also known for her work as an animal welfare activist

Doris Day, the actor, singer and animal welfare activist, has died at the age of 97. The Doris Day Animal Foundation confirmed the news.

Born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, Ohio, Day was known for a string of successful musicals and romantic comedies, including Pillow Talk, as well as a singing career that encompassed 29 studio albums.

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