Cole Porter

I can't recommend this Cole Porter musical highly enough: Anything Goes, at the Barbican, reviewed

6 August 2022 9:00 am

The Barbican’s big summer show is billed on the website as ‘the sold-out musical sensation, Anything Goes’. The term ‘sold-out’…

Contains at least 15 laugh-out-loud moments: Genesis Inc. reviewed

7 July 2018 9:00 am

Listen to the crowd. I often delay passing judgment on a show until the audience delivers its verdict. This is…

Donald Trump is an awkward ginger snob – and he owes me £20

7 May 2016 9:00 am

I am no admirer of Donald Trump — not because he is a doomsayer and professional patriot but because he…

Rambert Dance: one piercing masterpiece - and one dud

21 November 2015 9:00 am

Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife…

Please let's have more musicals like this Kiss Me, Kate at Opera North

10 October 2015 9:00 am

Opera North’s new production of Cole Porter’s masterwork Kiss Me, Kate has been so widely and justly praised that I…

An Austenesque Aga saga with hints of postmodernism

13 June 2015 9:00 am

Lovely, gentle Isabel, just 40, makes masks. Her husband Dan, erstwhile ‘student of the Classics’ and playwright manqué, is ‘bored…

‘Observer’s Post’, 1939, by Eric Ravilious

Irresistible: Ravilious at the Dulwich Picture Gallery reviewed

11 April 2015 9:00 am

The most unusual picture in the exhibition of work by Eric Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery, in terms of subject-matter…

A dressing room in London designed by Nicky Haslam, inspired by Dorothy Draper’s lobby at the Carlyle Hotel in New York

An armchair voyeur gets a glimpse into Nicky Haslam’s vast address book

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Phaidon pioneered the modern art-book in 1936. The formula was: large format, fine production, exceptional plates, and essays by the…

Richard Eyre rehearsing the London revival of ‘The Pajama Game’ at the Shaftesbury Theatre

The very best of Broadway – a director's cut

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Richard Eyre traces the history and popularity of the American musical