Beloved by the adults who grew up with it and the children just finding out about it, Shrek the movie and its timeless characters are still every bit as fun and relevant today as they were 23 years ago. So, it was with great delight that my Shrek-loving seven-year old daughter and I – also a big fan – heard that the award-winning Broadway and West End hit show ‘Shrek the Musical’ was going to be staged in Derry’s Millennium Forum. We headed off to opening night on Tuesday evening, full of...
Like a day-old bagel, "The Outsiders" is only a sufficient Broadway musical if you're absolutely starved for options.
Although “Stereophonic” is not a musical, it’s easy to get swept up by the terrific original rock songs that throb through it. And as writer David Adjmi’s play, which opened Friday night at the John Golden Theatre, is set during the mid 1970s, Will Butler’s music sounds authentically of that edgier era. Almost eerily so.
They’ve gotta keep marching.
What “Lempicka,” the mystifying new musical about Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka, needs more than anything else is turpentine.
Golden Theatre, New YorkThe tale of a fictional British-American rock band trying to make an album makes for compelling and incisive dramaBeyoncé Knowles memorably said: “People don’t make albums any more. They just try to sell a bunch of little quick singles.” More than a decade ago, she spoke with startling accuracy on the wash-rinse-and-repeat cycle of music-making. The nameless record executives who want ditties in the key of TikTok. Success itself is an underwhelming boom-bust.Stereophonic,...
Lucy Boynton plays a woman who can travel back in time with the power of a song in a high-concept, low-enjoyment fantasyIn the often insufferably cutesy romance The Greatest Hits, our heroine travels back in time whenever a song from her past is played, nostalgia acting as a magical, transporting force. While watching the film, we too are pulled back but rather to all of the far superior films we’re inconveniently reminded of, from High Fidelity to Richard Curtis’s similarly high-concept About...
Bernard B Jacobs Theatre, New YorkSE Hinton’s novel, which was adapted by Francis Ford Coppola for film, makes for a competent yet forgettable stage showIf Broadway must, for the same risk-averse pressures as Hollywood, keep rummaging through the library for more and more past touchstones to adapt, it could do worse than The Outsiders. SE Hinton’s seminal young adult novel has been a staple of middle and high school English classes for more than half a century for a reason. Though its once...
(Parkwood/Columbia)The Texan superstar’s eighth album is a thrilling 27-track journey through and beyond America’s roots music, and it feels like a genuine feastEver since Beyoncé – to quote the lady herself – “changed the game with that digital drop” via her self-titled fifth album, released without warning in 2013, she’s become the fixed point around which popular culture oscillates. Bandwidth-swallowing think pieces, detailed decoding of every lyric, plus an increasingly vexed right-wing...
This documentary about the Nirvana singer’s demise is at its best when it uses archive interviews with fans to show the scale of their loss. Otherwise, it struggles to really convey his impactUnfathomably, for those of us who remember it, Kurt Cobain died 30 years ago this month, at the age of 27. Kurt Cobain: Moments That Shook Music has been scheduled as the centrepiece for an evening of programming that celebrates Nirvana’s music and legacy, but the emphasis of the documentary itself is...
Driven by authenticity, earnestness, youth and ample heart, “The Outsiders” is very much an outsider itself.
Ben Power’s deft adaptation of Dickens’ sprawling novel emphasises its brilliant characters and eternally relevant themes, but the bleak production and dour music wrestle with one another rather than cohering as a whole