Just a quick heads-up about a piece I did for the Guardian online earlier this week about the adaptive possibilities of cabaret compared to more conventional theatre models – special forces rather than regular army, if you like. Here’s the opening: Dripping with rococo ornamentation and covered in mirrors, the Café Royal’s Grill Room in […]
Not that we needed one, but there’s a whole new reason to love the Royal Vauxhall Tavern: a life-size street-art stencil of Britain’s fave Olympic medalist/smiley twink/Speedo-model/same-sex-love poster boy, Tom Daley, brandishing a groin-level declaration that ‘All We Need Is Love’, complete with rainbow-hued love-heart. Created on Friday (January 17, 2014) by street artist Pegasus, the […]
I do love a bit of music hall. It’s a form that’s often seen as a bit cheesy – those nudge-nudge euphemisms and all those Victorian collars and frills – but there’s so much to cherish in its rampantly eclectic line-ups of disparate talents, beautiful spaces and assured audience rapport. (That side of things […]
This is my review from the January 2014 issue of Sight & Sound of Beth B’s documentary Exposed: Beyond Burlesque, about the NYC alt performance and burlesque scene. It features Bambi the Mermaid, Bunny Love, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, Mat Fraser, Rose Wood, Tigger! and World Famous *BOB* and plays at the ICA […]
To the Crazy Coqs in Piccadilly last night to catch the international debut of Carole J. Bufford, a young American songbook performer who hadn’t even left the US before this week. Under artistic director Ruth Leon, Crazy Coqs has rapidly established itself as arguably London’s leading showcase for classical cabaret acts from the States, and as […]
“To talk about Camp is…to betray it,” wrote Susan Sontag. Chance would be a fine thing. There wasn’t a whole lot of talking about camp at the ICA’s Notes on Camp panel event on Wednesday night. By rights, it should have been called Notes on Neo-Camp, since it offered ruminations on the recent exhibition of […]
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” It’s one of Margaret Thatcher’s most iconic quotations, even though, in the full context of the 1987 Woman’s Own interview from which it comes, she was actually saying something more nuanced – perhaps even the opposite of the assumed […]
On Friday December 13, four environmental activists with Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance were arrested at the headquarters of Devon Energy, a company engaged in fracking and tar-sands extraction of which the Keystone XL pipeline is a major example. Two of them chained themselves to the building’s entrance and two of them unfurled a Hunger Games-inspired […]
Another year down, another heaving goodie bag of cabaret goodness to trawl through in the name of the fool’s errand of selecting the year’s finest. I won’t pretend this is remotely objective or comprehensive – it’s just ten of the moments from 2013 that stand out for me. Let me know the bits you think […]
