It brings tears to my eyes every time. She makes the piano sing.
Category: Performing Arts
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RIP Tina
The force of nature that was Tina Turner has left us. Not only a powerful singer and performer, but she also gave us some great screen roles – Aunty Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and (my favourite) The Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s Tommy.
I would quibble with her obituary in the Guardian which says “her performance [in Tommy] was one of its few critically acclaimed moments…” Few? What film was the writer thinking of? Ken Russell’s Tommy is a visual tour de force with Ann-Margret giving her all along with Tina…
This tribute from George Miller (the director of Mad Max) gives a better sense of who she was as a person.
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The Coronation Concert
I’m in the study pottering behind the computer while Martin is in the living room watching the Coronation Concert for King Charles III on the Beeb. I can hear the sound – and so far it seems to consist of interminable voiceovers telling us how memorable the whole thing is going to be. It sounds as though it’s going to be absolutely dreadful…
Dear god – we’re 20 minutes in and it hasn’t even got under way. Where the f*ck are Charlie and Camilla?
By way of contrast, we watched the Liberation day concert a few days ago which is held each year in the presence of Willem-Alexander and Maxima on a stage by an Amsterdam canal, and many of the audience are in boats. It went like clockwork and was brilliant. Take that, you Brits!
Martin’s given up watching it. Thumbs-down from him. Oh well, it’s Eurovision this week – something to look forward to…
And I’m glancing at the Guardian’s liveblog about the concert, which proves to be much more entertaining than the real thing…
There’s a little slider on the Guardian’s liveblog page marked “Show key events only”. I fear that if I activate it, the whole page will disappear into electronic oblivion…
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RIP Diana
Saddened to hear that Dame Diana Rigg has died. Even though she reached the respectable age of 82, I’m sure she would have carried on giving delight to audiences if cancer hadn’t got its claws into her.
I suppose that for most people she will be best known for her performance as Lady Olena Tyrell in Game of Thrones, but for many of us she remains etched in our memories as Emma Peel – the best partner that John Steed ever had. The House That Jack Built remains my favourite episode of The Avengers, right from when I first saw it in 1966.
Her range as an actress was wide – from Shakespeare to musicals (we were fortunate enough to see her in the London production of Follies in 1988), and she starred in productions in the theatre, film and TV. I still remember, with a shudder, her brilliant performance as Helena in Mother Love, and with a wry smile, her performance as Mrs. Gillyflower in The Crimson Horror episode of Doctor Who.
She lives on in our memories, and in the recordings of those productions to which she gave her talent.
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Carmina Burana
I was revisiting an old post of mine about a strange version of Carmen, and discovered that there’s a sequel that is perhaps even more weird: Carmina Burana – as you’ve definitely never seen it before…
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An Afternoon Concert
Yesterday I went to an afternoon concert in which Lucas Jussen played Saint-Saëns 5th Piano Concerto with Het Gelders Orkest. I enjoyed it very much.
Also on the program were the orchestral suites of Daphnis et Chloé, but what was a revelation to me was the opening piece: Stravinsky’s Chant Funèbre. This was composed in 1909 as a memorial to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, but the score was lost. It was only rediscovered in the spring of 2015. Worlds away from the Rite, which was to follow a scant few years afterwards, but a beautiful memento mori.
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Is There Life on Mars?
Simply extraordinary…
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Cries From Casement and Penda’s Fen
A long time ago, back in 1973, I heard a play on BBC Radio: Cries from Casement as His Bone are Brought to Dublin. It was an extraordinary experience, and a brilliant realisation of the script.
This week I bought the BFI’s Blu-ray transcription of Penda’s Fen, one of the plays in the BBC’s “Play for Today” series, that was first broadcast on television in 1974. I’ve just sat down and watched it, and it was equally extraordinary.
Something nagged at my memory, and I realised that both works were written by David Rudkin. Whilst I doubt that you will be able to hear the radio play again, the BFI/BBC release of Penda’s Fen is available. It’s well worth seeking out.
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RIP Lindsay Kemp
Alas, Lindsay Kemp has died. I saw his theatre-piece Flowers (A Pantomime for Jean Genet) in London in the mid 1970s, and was bowled over by it. I’m fairly sure that I saw it on two occasions, one being (I think) in the Bloomsbury Theatre (then called the Collegiate Theatre) in Gower Street, London, but I can’t find a reference to Flowers ever being performed there.
Lindsay, with just ten other performers (including Jack Birkett) created a powerful theatrical experience that remains with me. Thank you, Lindsay.
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Steve Ditko
The Guardian reports today that Steve Ditko has died aged 90. He was one of the great comic book artists. I remember as a boy going round the corner to the newsagents in Walpole Avenue, in Douglas, Isle of Man, because they had the best selection of American comics in town. I soon came to recognise the Ditko name and his style of art, and always picked up an issue if he had illustrated a story in it. Alas, my comic collection has long since perished.
Walpole Avenue was a narrow street, and across the road from the newsagents was the Royalty Cinema, long since demolished. During the summer seasons in the 1950’s and up until the mid 1960’s it hosted live shows, usually of the stage hypnotist, Josef Karma – always billed as “The Great Karma”. I saw his show on at least two occasions, and was suitably impressed.
Childhood memories…
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Dance or Die
A documentary about Ahmad Joudeh. Watch it
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Oh, Bugger…
Victoria Wood has died. The news probably won’t mean much to most of you, but to me she was the laugh-out-loud, singing version of Alan Bennett. A brilliant writer and comedy performer. Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly…
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Into The Woods…
Just over a year ago, I blogged about the forthcoming film version of Into the Woods, the musical by Stephen Sondheim, which would be produced by Disney. I was a bit concerned that, despite a strong cast, the saccharine hand of Disney would ruin one of Sondheim’s best works. Add to that the fact that it was rumoured that Disney would be changing the story, and I wondered whether justice would be done.
Fast forward a year, and I’ve now seen it. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn good.
What astounds me are the hugely negative reviews on IMDB. Dozens of one-star reviews from people who clearly hated the film.
Some didn’t realise it was a musical, and hated it because of the fact that people sang in the film. Some who did realise that it was a musical didn’t like the tunes. This is rather like Emperor Joseph II telling Mozart that there are too many notes…
Sondheim is a genius, and Into the Woods contains some of his best work. Highlights are “Agony”, “On the Steps of the Palace”. These are nicely done in the film, while Meryl Streep gives “Stay with me” real power and pathos. And of course the perpetuum mobile of “Into the woods” itself is like a well-oiled sewing machine producing a rich tapestry of song.
And then there are the legions of parents who unthinkingly thought that a Disney film would be suitable for young children, despite the fact that it has a PG certificate. Er, hello, people, have you never actually read the Brothers Grimm? Clearly not, since in the original Cinderella story, the stepmother cuts off the toes and heels of her two daughters in order to make the shoe fit, while the witch blinds Rapunzel’s prince by having his horse throw him onto a forest of thorns.
There are five fairy tales: Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and a Sondheim invention, the Baker and his wife. The Baker’s tale is the thread stitching the other tales into one.
Act I ends “happily ever after”, but then Sondheim deepens the stories in Act II showing the broader skein of human frailties. Be careful what you wish for, indeed.
From the witch’s lament:
No matter what you say, children won’t listen.
No matter what you know, children refuse to learn.Guide them along the way, still they won’t listen.
Children can only grow from something you love to something you lose…To the prince’s seduction of the baker’s wife in “Any moment”:
Right and wrongs don’t matter in the woods, only feelings.
Let us meet the moment unblushed, life is often so unpleasant,
You must know that, as a peasant –
Best to take the moment present as a present for the moment…In the stage play, the narrator and the Baker’s father are played by the same person. In the film, they are not, and I feel the film is weakened by this decision, particularly since the Baker’s father is played by Simon Russell Beale, and he is rather wasted in his few moments on-screen.
It seems to me that Disney has softened the impact of Act II. In the stage play, Rapunzel is killed; here she lives happily ever after with her prince. Sondheim’s moral that life is messier than a simple fairy tale is somewhat lessened. Nevertheless, it’s a good effort – and far, far better than those depressing reviews on IMDB would suggest. It’s definitely worth taking a trip into the woods… No One Is Alone…
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Dear God…
…will someone please take the new Guardian web site and its designers far, far away? It’s not an improvement on the old, staid, “newspaper on the web” approach.
Here’s a case in point: an article about the great Irish actor Michael Gambon having to call it a day because he can’t remember his lines any more:
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/08/sir-michael-gambon-ends-theatre-career-memory
And what does the Guardian show us as “related content”? Fucking obituaries! Er, hello, Guardian web people, Gambon is not dead yet.
I despair…
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A Marxist Demolition of “Strictly Come Dancing”
Alexi Sayle is a comedian with Marxist leanings. I like him a lot. The BBC is currently into the twelfth series of its hit show Strictly Come Dancing, which is a dance competition that pairs celebrities with professional dancing partners. I like it a lot.
Alexi does not like it, not one little bit, so he’s penned a column in the Guardian to explain why. And, to be fair, he makes some good points. He clearly doesn’t like Ballroom Dancing, because, as he says:
Ballroom dancing is an aesthetic pursuit, an art form, that has been turned into a competition the result of which is that everything is done to attract the attention of the judges. The competitors must try to fit within a set of rules and so a tawdry, flashy, kitsch aesthetic takes over.
I can see what he means. But on the other hand, there must be many people who go Ballroom Dancing purely for the pleasure it gives them. I remember my parents, back in the 1950s, were avid ballroom dancers. They didn’t do it in any competitive sense, but purely for the pleasure – for the chance of dressing up a bit and having a good night out with their friends.
And quite frequently, when the evening was over, they would return home with their ballroom dancing friends and carry on the party, using the large lounge (my parents owned a small hotel), the piano, and the gramophone stacked with a bunch of Victor Silvester records.
Despite my parents passion for ballroom dancing, I never learned to dance; something that I’ve often regretted. And while I can understand Alexi’s distaste for what the Argentinian Tango has become:
If you see a couple performing a proper Argentine tango, you are watching a dance created in the brothels of Buenos Aires that reeks of melancholy and sex and is accompanied by complex music that has grown alongside the dance and is inseparable from it. Then you watch the ballroom version, all gurning faces and robotic, angular, hideous movement, which on the show is generally accompanied by awful music that has absolutely nothing to do with the dance; you are seeing a great popular art reduced to a terrible travesty.
… I can also appreciate that it doesn’t have to be this way. It can be the most wonderful sensual dance:
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Indistinguishable From Magic
Arthur C. Clarke once wrote:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
That’s the thought behind this video: Box.
(hat tip: Richard Wiseman)
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A Talent is Lost
The sculptor and designer Graeme Gilmour has died far too early at the age of 48. I never had the privilege of seeing any of his outdoor theatre events, but I treasure my evening in the Amsterdam Schouwburg theatre watching Shockheaded Peter. A terrific production in every sense of the word.
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Wilson, Kepple, but no Betty
Funny how things can stick in your mind. Impressions from years ago that, even then, were hand-me-downs from your parents and older family members. Things that you would never have experienced firsthand, yet were alive to you.
So it is with Wilson, Kepple and Betty.
I could never have seen this trio perform, yet somehow I grew up with them and the sand dance. here’s Wilson and Kepple, in a recording of their most famous number.
Camp, endearing, and somehow absolutely wonderful.
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Shadowland
We’ve been fans of the dance company “Pilobolus” for more years than I care to remember. In recent years, they’ve begun to use techniques of shadow puppetry in their dances.
Judging from this, they’ve got it down to a very fine art indeed. Staggeringly good.
(hat tip: Why Evolution is True)
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Litmus Test
Reading the reactions to Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony is something of a litmus test, gauging where the commentator resides on the spectrum from left to right, or from heartfelt to disingenuous.
I have to say that I loved it, although it was so full of cultural references that I will need a second or third viewing to appreciate them all. As Marina Hyde wrote,
…as deliciously indigestible to global tastes as Marmite or jellied eels. I loved it.
Just to make it clear, I am on the opposite end of the spectrum to the tweets from Aidan Burley, and from the blindness of those who did not see the Windrush reference (Ranga Mberi, I’m looking at you).
Overall, I find myself in agreement with Al Weiwei, who compared the machine-like opening of the Beijing games (impressive as it was) with the gentler, more human-scale vision of the London Olympics.
But I have to doff my hat at Marina Hyde’s invention of the term “the global arseoisie”, and her description of them:
For while it was the best of folks, it was also the worst of folks. Gazing stonily down on a parade of athletes, about whose dreams and sacrifices this entire extravaganza is supposed to be, were some absolute shockers. Taking gold in the Biggest Scumbag in the Stadium event was probably the Bahraini prince, on whose directives athletes are reportedly tortured, flanked on the podium by Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Prince Andrew’s brutal mate from Azerbaijan.
That’s humanity – the best and the worst; thrown together, with mostly the worst in charge…
Geoff Coupe's Blog 