Arts Reviews

As we know, when terrestrial television has a big new hit these days, its response – once it’s got over the surprise – is to serve up a variation on the same formula. In the case of The Hack, the hit that inspired it is clearly Mr Bates vs the Post Office, as another real-life plucky underdog takes on a shadowy, powerful cabal – this time over phone-hacking – and struggles to get the story heard. In the first episode, the formula remained strong, but the variation bit fell somewhere between the unnecessary and the badly misguided. The episode opened with a voice-over urging us to imagine a country where

Never judge a musical by its score alone. Even more than with opera, the music is only ever half the story and if you judge a classic show from the cast recording, you might get a shock when you see it staged. Leonard Bernstein’s Candide is generally reckoned to be one of the fizziest, funniest Broadway scores ever composed. But in the theatre, the storyline is so intractable that the combined efforts of Richard Wilbur, Lillian Hellman, Stephen Sondheim and even (it’s said) Dorothy Parker haven’t succeeded in establishing a definitive, stageable version.  No such problem with Sondheim’s own Follies: you’d be hard put to find a smarter piece of

This exhibition will be busy. You’ll shuffle behind fellow pilgrims. But it’ll be worthwhile. It’s a tour de force that tells the story of Marie Antoinette’s 17 years on the throne with detail, focus and flair. There are 34 items here that she owned personally – opulent, carefree objects that resonate with impending disaster. These precious items need protecting from light, and in the first room curator Sarah Grant cleverly runs with this, evoking the candlelit ambience of a Versailles ball by hanging silver baubles from the ceiling and covering the walls with smoked mirrors. Here we have a taste of Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe – its annual budget peaking at

In Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim catches something of what makes Georges Seurat so brilliant – not just his technical flair, but his engagement with ordinary life. Sondheim has Seurat sing, or rather woof, a little duet between two dogs meeting on the island of La Grande Jatte; later, Sondheim gives Seurat a pointillist melody as he works, crotchet-dabs of blue, blue, blue, red, red… Seurat’s muse, meanwhile, is called Dot. Seeing the National Gallery’s somewhat overloaded presentation made me long for the light touch of Sondheim. There are wonders here, and it is a great coup for the National Gallery to have drawn these 50-odd works

The drama series Doc began with the most literal of bangs. While the screen remained black, the sound-effects team knocked themselves out by creating a spectacular crashing noise. When the lights came on, we saw a smashed-up car containing ‘a female, unresponsive’. By the time she did respond – one major brain operation and seven seconds of the show later – it was apparent to the doctors that there was something high-concept wrong with her. As her colleagues at Minneapolis’s Westside hospital, they knew she was right to say her name was Amy Larsen, but her answers about her children’s ages, her current job status and the name of the

Love’s Moment is one of those quiet radio programmes you’re unlikely to have read about. It aired without fanfare at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, an understated yet engrossing one-off, half-hour documentary. It can now be found in the recesses of BBC iPlayer. It opened with a compelling question: ‘What happens when two artists fall in love and marry, and as one’s reputation soars, the other’s is slowly forgotten?’ Narrator Gwyneth Lewis, former National Poet of Wales, might have been alluding to any artistic couple in history, but her subjects were R.S. Thomas and Mildred Eldridge. Thomas was one of the most popular poets in Wales in the last century. He was an