Arts Reviews

Young male singers won the right to be sensitive in 1963, when The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released. And in the 63 years since, being young and vulnerable and questing has been one of the great default settings. I’d say you can’t go far wrong singing sadly about your feelings, but of course you can, as the great mountain of discarded troubadours proves. Yet the size of that rejects mountain also tells us how alluring the prospect of baring one’s feelings to strangers can be. Zach Condon, who works as Beirut, and Dove Ellis are at different points on the sensitive young man spectrum. Condon is 39 for a start,

Two hours of yakking about Israel. That’s all you get from Giant at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Endless wittering laced with venomous bigotry. The year is 1983 and the celebrated kiddie author, Roald Dahl, has kicked up a massive stink by denouncing Israel for attacking Lebanon in late 1982. His latest scribble, The Witches, is about to be published in America but a handful of bookshops are threatening to boycott his work. Tom and Jessie, two executives from Dahl’s publishing firm, visit him at home and beg him to withdraw his anti-Semitic rant. Dahl refuses because he loathes the Jews, hates Israel and endorses all the usual myths about Jewish

Although I doff my hat to Carlos Acosta’s BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior troupe, for a reminder of what is owed to the Ballets Russes – nothing less than the creation of a new art form – the programme it’s presenting in Diaghilev and the Birth of Modern Ballet is neither well balanced nor coherent. Between some highlights of the most familiar Fokine repertory, an extract from Nijinska’s Les Biches has oddly been inserted, and there was nothing here to suggest the fact that Massine was by far the most dominant choreographer of the Ballets Russes’s interwar era and someone indeed who had personally worked with BRB in its previous

The Merry Widow was born in Vienna but she made her fortune in the West End and on Broadway. The original 1905 Viennese production was a shoestring affair. It was the English-language revivals in London and New York that made the Widow a global smash, and that happened only after extensive rewriting, done with Lehar’s wholehearted endorsement. Hanna Glawari (deemed unpronounceable) was renamed Sonia Sadoya, Zeta became Baron Popoff and the comedian George Graves inserted a humorous monologue about a chicken called Hetty. You probably had to be there. Anyway, the point is that operetta is protean. Rewrites, updates and changes of setting are not only forgivable; they’re intrinsic to

Antonin Carême was known as the ‘chef of kings and the king of chefs’. His patrons and employers included Talleyrand, Napoleon, the Prince Regent, Tsar Alexander and the then richest man in France, James Rothschild. He popularised the tall ‘toque’ hat worn by chefs; he either invented or perfected culinary classics including the vol-au-vent, the profiterole and the mille-feuille, as well as sauces including velouté and béchamel. All this he managed to achieve despite having come from a desperately poor background, raised in a shack in revolutionary France and sent off as a young lad to help make ends meet as a kitchen boy and later as apprentice to Paris’s

The Gang of Three gets into the nitty-gritty of Labour politics in the 1970s. It opens with the resignation of Roy Jenkins as deputy leader in 1972 in a desperate attempt to quell the party’s growing hostility to the Common Market. He holds a council of war with Anthony Crosland, his old Oxford chum, and they discuss their next moves while awaiting the arrival of Denis Healey whom they both heartily detest. The writers, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, capture the characters beautifully. Crosland considers himself more gifted and mature than Jenkins but he hasn’t yet made his mark by holding one of the great offices of state. He boasts