Awesome new albums, great gigs, spectacular stage performances and a host of fantastic films, – they are all featured in our critics’ picks of the best of music, theatre and film. Read on to find out what to see and do this weekend…
MUSIC
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Kacey Musgraves Deeper Well Out now
She cut her teeth as a dime-store cowgirl in Nashville and her home state of Texas, but Kacey Musgraves has always been happy to upset the country establishment. Her first two albums — 2013’s Same Trailer Different Park and 2015’s Pageant Material — were musically traditional, but she’s gone on to blend rock, disco and electronics in a mix she calls ‘galactic country’.
For her fifth LP, she’s taken a leaf out of Taylor Swift’s book. When Swift made 1989, her first ‘official pop album’, she moved from Nashville to The Big Apple and opened the record with a song called Welcome To New York.
While Kacey Musgraves has taken a leaf out of Taylor Swift ’s book for her new album, she also shows she still has an ear for a stinging couplet and a respect for country-style storytelling
Musgraves is now following suit: she made Deeper Well in the city’s fabled Electric Lady Studios, made famous by Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder.
The singer, 35, says she was seeking ‘a different environmental energy’, and Deeper Well maintains her admirable habit of doing something fresh with each release. The onus this time is on soft vocal harmonies and lush acoustic arrangements. If there’s a musical connection to New York, it’s in the legacy of reflective singer-songwriters such as Carly Simon, Carole King and Simon & Garfunkel.
When Musgraves made her last album, Star-Crossed, she was still reeling from her 2020 divorce from fellow country star Ruston Kelly. A tale of ‘two lovers ripped right at the seams’, it was an emotionally bruised break-up record. She’s now more footloose and fancy-free and these songs are the calm after the storm, but she still has an ear for a stinging couplet and a respect for country-style storytelling.
The New York backdrop is apparent on Nothing To Be Scared Of, set on Manhattan’s West Side. The city is in the frame again on Too Good To Be True. The latter has a lilting melody based on US singer Anna Nalick’s 2004 single Breathe (2 AM), and it finds Musgraves taking a new lover to New York: ‘Made some breakfast, made some love… this is what dreams are made of on a cloudy Monday morning.’
Elsewhere, helped by regular producers Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, she sings of the importance of love over money (Lonely Millionaire) and not letting the bad times grind you down (Sway). Her songs grow more stripped-back as the album develops, but her voice retains its powerful, creamy timbre. When she first emerged, fellow Texan Willie Nelson hailed Kacey as a huge talent. She went on to win the prestigious Album Of The Year Grammy for 2018’s Golden Hour, and is now building further on that promise.
Adrian Thrills
Kacey Musgraves is touring the UK from May 9 to 15
TWO MORE AWESOME NEW ALBUMS
CAITY BASER: Still Learning
Southampton-born Baser lost out to The Last Dinner Party after being nominated for the Rising Star award at the BRITs, but this 13-song ‘mixtape’ confirms her arrival as a brash new presence in British pop.
‘You say I’m trouble, well I say that I’m fun,’ she sings on I’m A Problem, setting the tone for a cheeky, chatty release. The 21-year-old lambasts empty-headed suitors on Pretty Boys and offers a pep-talk to a broken-hearted pal on the jazzy Showgirl. Animated, irreverent — and on the road this month — she’s an ideal Generation Z pop star.
Adrian Thrills
NORAH JONES: Visions
Jones has always been more enterprising than her demure image suggests, and she continues to spring surprises. Her ninth solo album, made with soul saxophonist and drummer Leon Michels, puts dinner-party jazz on the back burner in favour of funky R&B and raw country.
She’s a versatile instrumentalist, too, at home on the piano and twangy, Nashville-style guitar.
If 2020’s Pick Me Up Off The Floor, made in lockdown, was her mid-life crisis album, she’s now far more philosophical (on That’s Life) and even celebratory (on I Just Wanna Dance). A refreshing return.
Adrian Thrills
AND TWO GREAT GIGS
OMD
Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys of OMD are currently on a roll after reaching the top two for the first time with a studio album, the amiably intense Bauhaus Staircase.
Andy McCluskey, above, and Paul Humphreys of OMD are currently on a roll
At the 02 Apollo in Manchester, they open with a track from it, which can be a passion-killer. And this song, Anthropocene, is a sobering look at the state of the planet. But it soon turns into something new to me: a climate-crisis clap-along.
The atmosphere never falters. McCluskey brings the yearning vocals and the whirling arms while Humphreys and Martin Cooper supply the gleaming synth hooks and Stuart Kershaw adds beef on the drums.
The stage design, like the music, is high-tech but heart-warming and the evening ends where the story began, with Electricity, possibly the catchiest tune ever to get stuck at No99.
The whole show has been like bumping into old friends and finding you like them even more.
Tim de Lisle
Touring until March 27
Marika Hackman
Marika Hackman has won friends and plaudits with her artful song-writing while never quite troubling the Top 40. Her latest album Big Sigh, was the first essential album of the year.
Marika Hackman released the first essential album of the year with Big SIgh
Born in Hampshire, the daughter of animators (one of them Finnish), Hackman is now 31. For an artist it’s a great age to be. You’re still young but you’ve worked out who you are. In Hackman’s case that means being three musicians in one.
She’s a singer-songwriter strumming a guitar, a drama queen making a scene and a pianist playing pensive instrumentals. Halfway through Big Sigh is a piano piece, meditative yet immediate, just waiting to be deployed in a BBC drama.
Like many a songwriter, Hackman brings you the joy and pain of being in love, but she also captures the mess.
Her voice can be softly confessional or suddenly commanding. Fans of Phoebe Bridgers and her supergroup boygenius will love her.
Tim de Lisle
Touring until March 21
THEATRE
SHOW OF THE WEEK
Uncle Vanya
Sir Trevor Nunn, former RSC and National Theatre frontman, has descended on Richmond to re-create Anton Chekhov’s Russian masterpiece, Uncle Vanya, in his own image. To this end, he has cast Ted Lasso’s James Lance (aka Trent Crimm of The Independent) — an actor blessed with even more luxuriant hair and goatee than the 84-year-old Nunn in his pomp — in the title role.
The play is about a forlorn estate manager in provincial 19th-century Russia, and it has clearly been a labour of love for Nunn. The result is a period piece in more ways than one: a traditional costume drama, yes — but as Chekhov was performed 30 years or more ago (in Sir Trevor’s middle age).
James Lance, aka Trent Crimm of The Independent in Ted Lasso, plays Vanya with humility as a wry and rueful roué, wallowing in a lifetime of disappointment
Happily, that means we are treated to a rigorous and thoughtful performance centred first on a sturdy samovar, and later a circular sofa.
Nor is it too gloomy. Initially, it lets off steam with light comedy as the small family group is visited by Vanya’s rich, famous and ageing brother-in-law — a professorial stick insect who arrives with pretty young wife in tow.
But Nunn’s tightly drilled cast get to blow the lid off their respective pots with tears and declamations when their stewing passions finally boil over.
It can’t be easy for James Lance to look despondent beneath that magnificent mane. It’s an independent life form that might pull crowds in Kew Gardens. Yet he plays Vanya with humility as a wry and rueful roué, wallowing in a lifetime of disappointment.
Even better is Andrew Richardson’s dejected doctor, besotted with the professor’s wife (Lily Sacofsky). He is an early Russian eco-activist who has an amazing ability for his eyes to detach from his charming good humour and drift into a parallel reverie of sadness.
There’s also a great turn from Madeleine Gray as Vanya’s lovelorn niece Sonya, the plain and overlooked daughter of the professor, who pines for the doctor. Bossy as she is, she’s also hugely sympathetic, because as a reluctant martinet, she craves affection but commands obedience.
She bears her burden of unrequited love with the courage of a saint; and delivers a heart-breaking closing hymn to hope and eternity.
Patrick Marmion
Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond. Until April 13, 2hrs 40mins
FOUR OTHER SPARKLING SHOWS
The Crucible
The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s parable of America’s anti-communist purges during the 1950s, has been brought bang up to date in Sheffield. Nor is the coincidence of the venue’s name and play’s title lost on Anthony Lau’s riveting production.
Rose Shalloo chills as Abigail in this riveting production of Arthur Miller’s classic
For black magic and 1950s anti-communist hysteria, read paranoid conspiracy theory in this spartan, mostly modern dress production.
And the play’s moral panic around invisible crimes chillingly echoes today’s social media preoccupation with virtue signalling, self-censorship and political hygiene.
Using racially mixed casting to mirror modern Britain, and sticking with modern British accents, the show feels like a public meeting on Georgia Lowe’s set of a podium scattered with stacking chairs and microphones.
The melodrama is mirrored ominously in composer Giles Thomas’s organ and chamber music, that murmurs almost throughout.
At the performance I caught this week, the audience — a mix of pensioners and school parties — was spellbound.
No wonder. Simon Manyonda’s stoical Proctor is an ordinary man who pays a terrible price for ordinary faults. Anoushka Lucas is a steely saint as his devoted wife Elizabeth, and Rose Shalloo, as Proctor’s vengeful former lover Abigail, who sends half the town to the gallows, chillingly knows she must bear false witness — or perish herself.
Patrick Marmion
Crucible Theatre, Sheffield. Until March 30, 3hrs
Ben And Imo
Around the same time that Bevan was trying to get the NHS on its feet, the cantankerous composer Benjamin Britten was trying to create an opera for the coronation of Elizabeth II.
Britten’s music is often a dissonant assault on the ear. He was a fickle friend who had dubious relationships with choirboys.
Victoria Yeates and Samuel Barnett star in Mark Ravenhill’s two-person play
And yet there is nothing that the love of a good woman can’t fix in Mark Ravenhill’s two-person play which premiered on Radio Three in 2013.
The woman in question was Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav, another English composer. She pitches up in Britten’s Aldeburgh home to help him finish his opera, Gloriana. But between his homosexuality, and her settled spinsterdom, the only thing at stake is the seldom-performed opera, all but disowned by the composer himself.
Even so, Erica Whyman’s playful and finely tuned production creates a sympathetic portrait of an intense and unlikely friendship.
Imo (Victoria Yeates) is a cheerfully unpaid shrink, nanny, big sister, alter ego and chef. Samuel Barnett’s petulant Britten is a tortured, self-pitying neurotic.
Luckily, Imo believed ‘composers are the most fascinating things that ever lived’. And her faith gets us over the line.
Patrick Marmion
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until April 6, 2hrs 15mins
Nye
Michael Sheen was born to play his hero, Welsh wizard Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, the miner-turned-MP. Bevan did more than any other individual to bring the NHS into being.
Michael Sheen is terrific in the title role of Tim Price’s fantasy-style play
In this fantasy-style play, we meet him in pink pyjamas in an NHS hospital bed with trademark bouffant hair. It’s 1960 and he’s dying of stomach cancer, though he doesn’t know that.
I thought Nye would be a weepie but the play’s writer Tim Price has delivered a messy epic that’s both engrossing and good fun.
Sheen is terrific and never off stage. We get flashbacks to the lad whose stammer was punished at school, the miners’ rep who becomes a Member of Parliament and finally Minister of Health.
His wife, the MP Jennie Lee – played by Sharon Small, superb – looms large. Quite rightly. She was a political firecracker with her own story. Other parts include the long-suffering Clement Attlee, obstructive Cabinet Minister Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather – brilliantly played by Jon Furlong – who tries to suffocate Nye with a pillow (!), plus sundry miners, nurses and family members.
Winston Churchill (Tony Jayawardena) gets a good look in. Bevan attacked him throughout the war, ignoring the parliamentary truce and making himself hated. What a fool he could be.
The play is thrillingly directed by Rufus Norris with inventive designs and a stage that’s teeming. There’s a great scene in which a cohort of masked doctors reject the proposed NHS – a mutiny of entrenched self-interest that the play doesn’t duck.
Passionate stuff, often moving and totally relevant.
Robert Gore-Langton
Olivier Theatre, London. Until May 11, 2hrs 40mins
LAST CHANCE: The Motive And The Cue
If the ghost of Sir John Gielgud hovers anywhere, it is surely the Noel Coward Theatre, where his Hamlet in the 1930s was judged the definitive performance of the times.
Now, 90 years on, on the same stage, Mark Gatiss brings the man himself to glorious, uncanny life in Jack Thorne’s play: a fascinating examination of the alchemy that is acting.
Mark Gatiss (left with Johnny Flynn as Burton) brings John Gielgud to glorious life
Based on first-hand accounts, Thorne imagines the build-up to the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet, with firebrand Welsh actor Richard Burton as ‘a new Hamlet for our time’.
The result is a resounding clash between two theatrical titans: one a 60-year-old has-been in a brown corduroy suit, the other a 1960s celebrity in a black polo-neck, two decades his junior, newly married to screen-siren Elizabeth Taylor (Tuppence Middleton).
It’s also a collision between two sharply contrasting sensibilities and theatrical traditions.
Burton (marvellously played by a mercurial Johnny Flynn) is an instinctive actor cast as a procrastinator, and is desperate for direction. Instead, Gatiss’s Gielgud, his head held higher than high, who knows the play by heart, gives him his own line-readings. ‘You shout wonderfully,’ comments Gielgud of his star’s delivery, deceiving no one with his beaming smile.
From Thorne’s telling of how the longest-running Hamlet in Broadway history came to be (and almost not to be), director Sam Mendes has spun a tense, superbly-performed production.
Theatrical gold.
Georgina Brown
Noel Coward Theatre, London. Until March 23, 2hrs 40mins
FILM
FILM OF THE WEEK
Drive Away Dolls Cert: 15, 1hr 24mins
Weighing in at a succinct 84 minutes, Drive-Away Dolls does not hang about. Within moments, it has comprehensively set out its cinematic stall. A famous actor – in this case Pedro Pascal but others follow – has taken on the sort of small part they normally wouldn’t bother with, a central-looking character meets a swift and grisly end, and suddenly there’s an awful lot of rather startling lesbian sex going on, albeit obviously played for laughs rather than titillation. It is quite the opening five minutes.
Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls, starring Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, is like a freewheeling cross between Thelma & Louise and the Coens’ own No Country For Old Men
And what well-crafted fun it all turns out to be, as director and co-writer Ethan Coen takes a break from making films with brother Joel and instead creatively partners up with his wife (Ethan’s, not Joel’s), Tricia Cooke. She edited several of the brothers’ earlier films and, it feels pertinent to point out, describes herself as a ‘queer film-maker’. Hollywood, eh?
What ensues is like a freewheeling cross between Thelma & Louise and the Coens’ own No Country For Old Men, with two young women – promiscuous, motor-mouthed Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and buttoned-up, Henry James-reading Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) embarking on an impromptu road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee in Florida.
Jamie needs to remove herself from a difficult break-up, while Marian wants to reassess her life and possibly end a long sexual drought. But their respective plans are forcibly put on hold when they discover that the car they are supposed to be delivering contains a hat box and an executive briefcase, and that a pair of bickering bad guys are suddenly after them.
Yes, the basic plot is familiar – that’s clearly deliberate – but the execution is highly enjoyable, with Qualley having a ball as the loquacious Jamie and cameos from the likes of Bill Camp, Colman Domingo, Matt Damon and an uncredited Miley Cyrus adding to the considerable fun.
Matthew Bond
FOUR OTHER FAB FILMS STILL IN CINEMAS
The New Boy
Cert: 12A, 1hr 36mins
A film that sees an apparently orphaned Aboriginal boy being forcibly taken in by a children’s home run by nuns in the 1940s sounds like we’re all set for a misery-fest.
Cate Blanchett hugely watchable as Sister Eileen in The New Boy
But The New Boy is far stranger, more mystical, even magical than that, with Cate Blanchett hugely watchable as the practical, no-nonsense Sister Eileen and young Aswan Reid superb as the new boy of the title.
Sister Eileen, it turns out, is hiding a secret – that the priest who headed the rural children’s home has died. But the new boy is hiding a bigger secret…
Matthew Bond
High & Low: John Galliano
Cert: 15, 1hr 56mins
When the Scottish director Kevin Macdonald makes a documentary, it is almost always worth finding room in your diary to watch it.
John Galliano and Anna Wintour at a party in Paris in 1993
In High & Low: John Galliano, Macdonald’s subject is one of the most influential fashion designers of all time, the brilliant couturier whose career veered disastrously off the tracks, dragging his reputation with it, following a series of obnoxious anti-Semitic outbursts towards fellow customers in a Paris bar.
With contributions from the likes of Kate Moss, Anna Wintour, Naomi Campbell and Charlize Theron, the film chronicles his enormous success but the last third or so addresses his descent into alcohol and prescription-drug addiction, which fuelled those shocking 2011 tirades and their aftermath as he tried (not least by taking lessons about the Holocaust from a rabbi) to find redemption.
Really, this is a story of a modern-day Icarus, propelled into orbit by his own drive and talent, then melted by the fame and stardom that came with it. Fascinating and sad.
Brian Viner
Copa 71
Cert: PG, 1hr 30mins
I never knew there was a women’s football World Cup in 1971, when over 100,000 people crammed into Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium to watch Mexico and Denmark in the final, a year after the infinitely more celebrated men’s final took place in the same arena.
Inger Pedersen of Denmark lifts the trophy after the final of the World Cup in 1971
Outrageously, it has been all but expunged from the history books but this terrific documentary sets the record straight, with previously suppressed footage of the tournament, plus interviews with those who took part.
Brian Viner
Dune: Part Two
Cert: 12A, 2hrs 46mins
Having seen Dune: Part Two twice now, the muted response that followed its premiere is totally understandable. Not only is it even longer than 2021’s first instalment, but it bravely ends, yes, with umpteen bangs and a couple of important whimpers, but also with all sorts of untidy loose ends. A Hollywood ending this is not.
Timothée Chalamet is back as Paul Atreides in the visually stunning Dune: Part Two
Until that subdued ending it is quite magnificent. Visually, it provides a stunning spectacle with an immaculate sound design, and Hans Zimmer’s thrilling score only adds to the pleasure.
It resumes more or less where the first ended, after the bloody battle for Arrakis, which saw the cruel Baron Harkonnen back in charge of the only planet to have ‘spice’ – a powerful hallucinogen to some, the valuable key to interstellar travel to others.
The climactic battle saw the departure of several key characters, but here their place is capably taken by notable new arrivals – Christopher Walken as the Emperor, Florence Pugh as his daughter and Elvis star Austin Butler as the terrifying Feyd-Rautha, deranged nephew of Harkonnen.
But driving our story of power and prophecy are the central trio of Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, Rebecca Ferguson as his pregnant and increasingly mystical mother, and Zendaya as Chani, the Fremen freedom fighter.
Dune: Part Two is a complex and surprisingly subtle triumph. I doubt we’ll see a better science-fiction film this year. It’s just a shame about that ending.
Matthew Bond