Renée Zellweger already has strong musical cinema form, Her role as Roxie Hart in Chicago garnered her second Oscar nomination. However, playing and singing Judy Garland is a whole different ball game.
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia kicked off their series of concerts devoted to the edgy culture of the Weimar Republic with a programme that featured three works (out of four) derived in some way from the musical stage. That included, as a rip-roaring finale, the conclusion to Shostakovich’s football-themed ballet from 1930, The Golden Age. Given the theatrical energy that drove the evening along at the Royal Festival Hall, it felt at the outset slightly disappointing that we would see no (non-musical) drama on stage.
Five years ago this Kneehigh Theatre production caused a stir with its vibrant modern retelling of John Gay’s 18th century satirical classic, The Beggar’s Opera. It’s currently on tour again and it’s easy to see why a revival was greenlit.
Billie Eilish is a vaudevillian. Crack that and everything else falls into place.
Mid Wales Opera makes small-scale touring look fun – even when you suspect that, behind the scenes, it really isn’t. Barely 24 hours before this performance of their current production of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, and 11 dates into their current 16 date tour, their Torquemada, Peter van Hulle, was invalided out. Companies this size, and working on this budget, can’t carry understudies.
Getting the look right is half the battle: in that, Peter Groom's one-time-Captain Marlene Dietrich is a winner from the start. The looks at the audience nail it too, heavy-lidded and lashed but transfixing, charismatic, winning instant complicity. As with all the best one-(wo)man cabaret-style shows, though, this is no mere impersonation.
One of the biggest crowd roars of the night comes right at the start when Jake Shears runs onstage. He is wearing a grey top hat, a white tail-jacket with glittered lapel-edging, silver glittery trousers, a tight black sequinned vest top, and a bow tie on his bare neck. The 600 capacity Concorde 2, right on Brighton's seafront, is sold out.
There are two schools of thought on the Scissor Sisters. One was that they were vapid, over-cheery retro-pop of the worst order. The other is that they were an extension of New York’s ever-mischievous underground in all its underground LGBT+ disco glory. While they certainly leaned occasionally towards the former, I very much valued them as the latter. The first solo album from frontman Jake Shears provides the same quandary and its relentless Labrador bounciness won’t be for everyone.
Shears took time out when the Scissor Sisters went on hiatus in 2012 after their fourth album. Recently his autobiography was published, as candid as any, oozing with body fluids, and his new album also shoots from the hip, boasting a lyricism that’s proud, gay and vulnerable, albeit usually wrapped in multiple layers of sass and bravado. “Big Bushy Mustache”, for instance, about “porn star handlebars”, lathers its subject matter in joyous frivolity over a “Filthy/Gorgeous” funk-rock boogie, while “Sad Song Backwards”, a centrepiece of the album, has lyrics such as “Every god damn day since you left me/Hung me dry, betrayed and you effed me/I’m bereft, depressed and so confused” but still sounds ebullient over a Vaudevillian take on country stompin’.
Shears based his sound around Ray LaMontagne’s 2016 album Ouroboros, utilising its producer Kevin Ratterman and various musicians who worked on it. It’s not an album I know so cannot comment, but the overall sound of Jake Shears is an amped take on the Scissor Sisters first album, all that Elton/Queen vivaciousness filtered through an older, not always wiser Rufus Wainwright sensibility. There are places when the sense of listening to songs from a musical is overpowering – the single “Creep City” sounds like a catchy outtake from Little Shop of Horrors. But the album is at its best when sleazy funk takes over as on “S.O.B.” (“sex on the brain”!) or the slower “The Bruiser”, which borrows its drum track from Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing”.
Shears’ debut is a bit much, when consumed in one go, a feast that’s simply OTT in colours, spices, flavours and, especially, candy, but I’m betting it’s a grower. By the end of the year, its essence rather than its peacock surface display will have come to the fore, and some of these songs will be lodged in many of our brains.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Big Bushy Moustache" by Jake Shears
Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims.
The show’s subtitle – “Songs banned by the Nazis” – is a catchy one, and somewhere under the confetti, the stilettos, the extravagant nudity, the sequins and even shinier repartee that are wrapped around Effigies of Wickedness like a mink coat on the shoulders of an SS officer’s mistress is the bruised and grubby story of one of history’s foulest episodes.