Over the Hills and Far Away - The Marsh Family Click here to watch The Marsh Family in Faversham, Kent, often make music together and post the resulting videos on their YouTube channel but this one is different from their usual jolly efforts. As the father, Ben Marsh, puts it, “This song speaks for itself really. Europe is facing a conflict that conjures images we hoped our children would never witness. We believe Britain needs to step up and support Ukraine and its people, including those in flight.” They’ve made this adaptation of a traditional English folk song for Ukraine and written new lyrics to bring it right up to date. The tune is familiar from The Beggars’ Opera but it’s much older than that. This amazing family, father, mother, two girls, two boys, all play at least two instruments and they all sing. In tune. In this new video, the girls are wearing sunflowers, the emblem of Ukraine, in their hair, the boys wear the blue of the Ukrainian flag and their mother’s blouse is sunflower yellow in tribute. If this simple tribute doesn’t move you then you’re not paying attention. This Time – Broadway on Demand Click here to rent This Time follows six diverse recording artists on the verge of their next moment in the spotlight as they battle self-sabotage and the brutal realities of the music industry in this unflinching and uplifting story of utter dedication to an art form. Starring legendary recording artists and Elvis Presley backup singers The Sweet Inspirations. $5.95 48-hour rental Playlist Track 2 – English National Ballet Click here to watch This is a short extract from William Forsythe’s Playlist. I’m including it to introduce the work of this extraordinary and truly great choreographer to anyone not familiar with it, especially for those of us who can’t get to the ENB’s season at Sadler’s Wells in London on Mar 31-April 10. Forsythe is a titan of modern choreography. If you can get there, go, but if you can’t, take any opportunity to see any work by William Forsythe and thereby see the possibilities of ballet being expanded to the full glory of the human body. Created especially for 12 male dancers of English National Ballet, Playlist (Track 1, 2) was William Forsythe's first creation for a UK ballet company in over 20 years. Set to neo-soul and house music, Playlist (Track 1, 2) premiered as part of the ENO’s mixed bill Voices of America in 2018. Does anyone recognise these singers? Click here to watch A bitterly cold night in London’s Covent Garden. A street singer is entertaining passers-by with a song from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. A pretty girl in the crowd asks him for another from the same show, All I Ask of You and offers to sing it with him. “Are you any good?” he asks, tired of the endless stream of drunks insisting on singing with him. She encourages him to start the song, then shares his mic. This video, obviously shot on someone’s phone, in the dark, was sent to me by a New York friend. When we first saw it, neither of us knew who these singers were or where they were or whether they were standing outside a station or a shopping mall, or even which country they were in. I love the expression on the busker’s face when he first hears her beautiful voice and realises that the impromptu partner of his dreams has just happened by. He doesn’t believe it. They are both thrilled to have found each other on this freezing night. Right from the start it was obvious that both are trained singers. My guess was that the woman is a professional musical theatre performer and that maybe he is too. But who are they? Now, thanks to the detective work of another New York friend, we know more. He is Stephen Barry, a part-time busker from Ireland, who works in a gym between auditions. She is Celinde Schoenmaker, a musical theatre star from Holland, who has played Christine (the leading role) in the West End and in multiple productions of Phantom. I hope Steve’s hat was full of money at the end of the song. And that there will be many more duets between these two strangers who have amazing chemistry. My thanks to Alyce for sharing this lovely moment and to Sylvia for her successful sleuthing. Shakespeare's Globe - Player Click here to subscribe Shakespeare's Globe theatre, as close as you can get to experiencing a playhouse of Shakespeare’s own time, now has its own video website – Globe Player. If you love Shakespeare, especially if you enjoy the more outre and far out productions, buying an annual subscription for £59.99 is worth it. On the other hand, if you only want to watch one at a time, you can buy each of their productions separately for £9.99 apiece. Th ‘menu’ includes many tasty offerings which come from different phases of the Globe’s recent history. One of my favourites is the all-male 2009 Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance as Olivia and Stephen Fry as Malvolio. Another is the 2010 Henry 1V Part 1. Roger Allam’s Falstaff in this production won him an Olivier Award. If you prefer to see your theatre live, as it happens, albeit online, the Globe has started to livestream certain current productions. Details of these on the Globe’s website. Julia Fischer Plays Mozart – London Philharmonic Orchestra Click here for tickets Julia Fischer joins the London Philharmonic Orchestra as Artist-in-Residence, and directs Mozart’s First, Second and Third Violin Concertos. Imaginative, insightful and with a sound to die for, Julia Fischer is a byword for everything that’s most inspiring – and captivating – in 21st-century violin playing. Mozart is at the centre of her musical universe although, as she puts it, each of Mozart’s violin concertos is like ‘a new world’ in its own right. This concert of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 1, No 2 and No 3, was filmed in February 2022 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. The conductor is Thomas Søndergård. Pocket Review The Collaboration – Young Vic If you’re going to see a play or read a book or watch a documentary about a person or people recently alive, you should check in advance that you’re interested in them. That’s the one thing I should have thought of before I saw The Collaboration, an excellent new play by Anthony McCarten about the artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Paul Bettany’s Warhol is a perfect gormless platignum blond shield for Jeremy Pope’s hyper-active Basquiat, two artists so different in temperament and style that it’s difficult to reconcile them when they’re on the same stage, never mind imagining a three year artistic collaboration culminating in a multi-million dollar sale of the artworks produced. What they seem to have in common, apart from their individual iconic status in the art world, is self-loathing and insecurity. Overcoming their mutual suspicion, they slowly reveal these and their other shortcomings to one another while gossiping about fellow celebrities. They are both scornful of the money their art brings them, Basquiat demanding to be paid in cash which he throws on the floor of his filthy studio. The audience comes away with a sense of the ephemerality of art and the permanance of human need. Director Kwame Kwei-Amah does a brilliant job of discovering and mining their differences and his production couldn’t be bettered but, clearly due to a lack in me, I found I really didn’t care about either Jean-Michel Basquiat or Andy Warhol although their personalities, as manifested in this play, seem to me infinitely more interesting than their paintings.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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