Latest news with #Stereophonic
Metro
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
I had a luxe London trip on discount codes — with £30 theatre and £26 Hawksmoor
London rightly has a reputation as one of the most expensive cities in the world. That's fair enough, particularly when it comes to rent and mortgages. And yes, going out can also make a serious dent to your bank balance. But if you're a money saver, I think living or visiting the capital offers far more potential to cut other costs than anywhere else in the UK. And that doesn't require scrimping or thifting, nor does it mean missing out on some of the nicer things. Don't believe me? Here are some highlights from a few days I've just spent in London. With so many restaurants, there are also many ways to get really good food for less. One I took advantage of was a special menu at steak mini-chain Hawksmoor available at lunch, pre and post-theatre. The Slice is your weekly guide to what's happening in London, so if you're looking for restaurant reviews, drinks deals or just a great new exhibition to visit on a rainy Saturday in the capital, we've got you covered. Click here for this week's edit of the best things to do in town. The Slice newsletter also a brand new look! We'll still be in your inbox every week, bringing you all the very best things to eat, drink and do in the capital. So if you want get the next edition before anyone else, sign up here! If you want to do it all on the cheap, you can also find our latest batch of exclusive hand-picked offers in partnership with Time Out here. The hake and sweet potato main was delicious and sizeable and a happy hour glass of rose hit the spot. Stacking an American Express 10% cashback offer on top of this special menu, I paid just £26 including service. An hour later and the same meal would have set me back £42. Adding extra courses included in the offer would have increased the saving even more, but there wasn't any point spending more when I was full enough. And good news for non-Londoners, it also has locations with the same offer in Manchester, Liverpool and Edinburgh. It's no wonder there are frequent op-eds decrying how expensive West End theatre tickets are. The seat I had for matinee performance of the Broadway transfer of the Tony-winning Stereophonic was listed at £150. The row in front was priced at a staggering £250. However, I paid just £30, saving £120. That was thanks to the 'Rush ticket' feature on the app TodayTix. It's effectively a lottery on the day of the performance to fill empty seats. There's no guarantee you'll get a ticket, or that you'll get one of the top priced seats, so I was lucky. And though I don't agree with some of the rave reviews, for £30 it was an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. I managed to see a decent comedy show for just a tenner thanks to Central Tickets. The rules of websites like this are I can't say what I saw, but my seat should have cost £47.90 if I'd gone direct to the box office. I love a good gig, and managed to see two performances on my trip. The biggest bargain was an in-store from all-girl punk group Panic Shack at Rough Trade East, just off Brick Lane. For £16.06 I not only got access to an intimate gig, but also a copy of their new CD. Dates for their tour later this year start at £20 before fees, so throw in the album on top and I think it was at least a 50% saving. This way to save isn't just limited to London, but I used a free ticket to finally see Danny Boyle's latest movie 28 Years Later at the Vue Leicester Square. More Trending There are a few ways I get these, from opening up a Club Lloyds current account to a perk from Vitality health insurance, but this one was actually a freebie given away by my energy provider Octopus earlier in the year. Since weekend showings are often more expensive than others, using this on a Saturday saved me £13.99. Finally, travel. Yep the tube and trains are pricey, especially compared to other metro systems in other countries. The daily cap on card payments will help people moving around a lot, but I managed to beat this on my first day – and that was by adding a Travelcard to my inbound rail ticket. This added £5.60 to my fare, versus a £8.90 limit on Zone 1-2 travel with my debit card. And I knocked another 10% off that thanks to an offer for train ticket seller LNER via my American Express card. Total saving:£203.81. Total spent: £77.10. View More » MORE: Westminster Cathedral turned into drug dealer haven with 'cocaine sold on pews' MORE: Murder manhunt after woman in 20s killed outside Romford care home MORE: 'The worst show on TV' might finally be ending and viewers are surprisingly sad Your free newsletter guide to the best London has on offer, from drinks deals to restaurant reviews.
The Guardian
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The best theatre to stream this month: Stereophonic's suite of addictive songs
It's billed as a play not a musical but Stereophonic, the US hit now in London, has some of the best new songs played on a West End stage this decade. The tracks deepen the relationships within a rising yet imploding 70s band during coke-fuelled sessions for their new LP. But the songs become the source of much drama, too, not least when the group fight over which will make the final album. How could they cut Masquerade?! Happily it's included on the original, sensational Broadway cast recording alongside Bright, a track catchy enough to warrant its trio of versions. 'Queen Lear' was playwright Tanika Gupta's pitch for her 2024 drama about a British Bengali restaurateur and mother of three who is diagnosed with early onset dementia. Meera Syal plays the lead role. Available on National Theatre at Home from 8 July. A chance to look (or listen) to Lear itself. Richard Wilson as the king is reason enough to tune in but this Drama on 4 BBC radio production of Shakespeare's towering tragedy also boasts David Tennant, Greta Scacchi, Tamsin Greig and Toby Jones. 'She had the thing that you can't teach,' runs one accolade for Liza Minnelli in this documentary that takes in her illustrious lineage and the highs and lows of her personal life while also showcasing her electrifying performances. On BBC iPlayer. Jon Fosse won the Nobel prize in literature in 2023, praised by the committee for expressing 'the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest everyday terms'. Philadelphia's Wilma theatre presents A Summer Day, his meditation on memory, available 7-27 July. A tribute to blazing singer-songwriter featuring her tracks, her influences and a piece of her heart. Mary Bridget Davies dons the round glasses for the musical, filmed at the Peacock theatre in London in 2024. On Marquee TV from 4 July. In this 1973 play, Terence Rattigan 'came as close as he ever did to exposing his own emotional defensiveness', wrote Michael Billington. The Orange Tree's revival runs at the theatre until 5 July and is then available on demand, 8-11 July. From Sadler's Wells, here is a trio of short films that reimagine classic works. Folu Odimayo's The Lions are Coming draws on The Rite of Spring, Mythili Prakash's Mollika is inspired by Rabindranath Tagore and Aṁṁonia, choreographed by Emma Farnell-Watson and Kieran Lai, pays homage to Pina Bausch.
New Statesman
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Stereophonic: all the sex, drugs, tears and boredom of true rock 'n' roll
Photo by Marc Brenner The Fleetwood Mac model is the only one you can use to tell the story of a fictional band these days, because there are two women at its core, they're allies, and they both write songs: all the problems of the Seventies rock world are sidestepped right there. And so, in Stereophonic, we watch five men and women, Brits and Americans – all of whom could potentially be shagging each other, though some are also married to each other – slinking around looking dazzling, making a Rumours-style masterpiece, in the wondrous days when everything was brown. Arriving from Broadway fizzing with five-star energy, the show looks just like Amazon Prime's Daisy Jones and the Six, which was carried along by Elvis's astonishing granddaughter Riley Keough. But the challenges chosen by the writer David Adjimi, who took five years to do this script, are more eccentric: how to make two of the dullest settings – the windowless recording studio, and the circular, drug-fuelled diatribe – into something you actually want to see. The play is set entirely behind the mixing desk, over a period that should have been a month and ended up a year, and it asks the question I have always wondered about: how the hell is this setting conducive to creativity? The music starts and is instantly stopped, because there's not enough EQ on the mike, because people are arguing, and because each day begins with every band member completely trashed from the night before. The coffee machine is broken, but coke's the 'same thing', and the 'bag', as it's referred to, is a character of its own – around 2lbs of white powder swung about like a medieval mace. My throat tickled from the smell of earthy faux fags onstage. The problem with fictional bands has always been portraying songwriting and recording on stage or screen. It is impossible to make it interesting, unless it's Get Back and you're the Beatles. It is an internal wonder, a mental process: too often directors resort to what I call the 'Hey guys, what do you think of this' moment, when a deathless hit emerges in three spontaneous chords. Stereophonic is more realistic than this, and its realism is the heart of its success – at one point, six days' of studio time are given over to getting the sound of a snare right. The realism extends to a script that I found fresh in ways I can't fully explain. The characters – high, emotionally wounded, or giddy with cabin fever – talk nonsense as well as sense, and Adjimi exploits the originality in coke-fuelled language: bassist Reg is a 'sad man in a blanket'; English toff drummer Simon is trying to clean him up but, equally stoned, proposes going home to make dinner and try out his grandmother's recipe of a 'chicken smashed by a brick'. Band members start a speech in puffed up arrogance or make a desperate bid for creative independence – then find their ideas derailing mid flow, and shrink back and forth between self-expression and conformity in a way that feels truly psychological. At the heart of the web is the coercive singer-guitarist Peter (Jack Riddiford) – the Lindsay Buckingham to Diana's Stevie Nicks: she, played by Lucy Karczewski, has five songs on the album, more than anyone else, but her husband can't handle it, and whenever she presents something, he stares off with hate into the middle distance. He sold her guitar seven years ago ('I was going to learn it!' she sobs) and she's never had anything to do with her hands: all Peter can suggest is a Nicksian wave of the fingers. Arcade Fire's Will Butler, who wrote the music, probably wishes he'd been working in the Seventies – many musicians do. I thought Stereophonic was an immersive album experience, a kind of West End gimmick, and I was looking forward to it, but the music is more incidental than that, though it fleshes out in increasingly long studio sessions as the album gets written, flopping or firing up depending on what kind of day they're having. It's quite a thing to see the cast playing their instruments live: vocal takes are done in real time and laid on backing tracks right there in front of you. The real star is probably Eli Gelb, who plays the engineer schlub Grover, with a voice like Jonah Hill. He got the gig pretending he'd worked for the Eagles: his partner, the gnome-like Charlie, is only there because he's 'cousins with the main Doobie Brother'. Together, backs to the audience, all tight buttocks and flared jeans, they provide bemused commentary on the peacocks behind the glass. In the unseen outside world, the band's previous album goes to number one. 'I think we're really famous,' says someone. It doesn't look that great from here. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe [See also: The search for queer cinema] Related
Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
I've just seen the two best hours of theatre this year
I've just seen two of the best hours of theatre of the year. Does it matter that they were preceded by another hour of theatre that took its own sweet time? For a while I was worried that no show could handle the weight of expectations that Stereophonic brings with it from Broadway: a New York Times review dubbing it 'a must-see American classic' and the most Tony nominations so far for a nonmusical. Let alone one as self-styled and slow-boiled as David Adjmi's fly-on-the-wall, three-hour play about a Fleetwood Mac-like Anglo-American band taking a year, from 1976 to 1977, to make their soft-rock masterpiece in a Californian recording studio. I can forgive a stodgy opening more than a fudged ending, though. Judge Ibsen by only his first scenes — often as not, a pair of servants filling each other in on who the other characters are — and you would never get his greatness. If I'd left the final Sondheim musical Here We Are (at the National until June 28) at the interval, before its wonky but wonderful second act, I'd be convinced it was a glib takedown of Manhattan manners. The first hour-plus of the new Mission: Impossible film is largely people spouting grave exposition to each other indoors — but the last hour has a cool bit in a submarine, and a way-cool bit with biplanes, so all is forgiven. The gurulike Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie insists his payoff only works because of all that no-action set-up. I'm not convinced, but I do wonder, looking back at Stereophonic, how much the extraordinary emotional detonations of its final half owe something to its rambling introduction. Slowly but surely we get to know this fictional band's fractious, talented pair of couples and their peace-making drummer. We see them coerce, clash, kiss, yack on, and now and then make beautiful music together. • The best shows in London and the UK to book now Part of you wants to go in to remix the thing — trim bits here, add more ambiguity there. But then, as you imagine yourself in the same wood-panelled control room as the two hairy engineers listening in, these meltdowns and epiphanies start to feel thrillingly intimate. One late scene has heinous insults being thrown one second, heavenly harmonies being sung the next. It's a neat gag and a sharp insight into the paradoxes of making things. It's the band's search for perfection that is the making and breaking of them. Six days on a drum sound. A song you see the guitarist Peter take from good to great as he rearranges it while the band plays it. Amid a strong cast, Jack Riddiford as Peter wields his American accent, instrument and undiplomatic insights with utter authority. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews The director David Aukin makes it all plausible and propulsive. The designer David Zinn makes that studio so real you feel you could lean forward and operate the faders yourself. Could they have got to the great stuff an easier way? Sure, in a perfect world. Yet Adjmi has an angle on perfection — that it's less important than something that's alive, that makes you feel — just as he has an angle on relationships and creativity, and the mix of the heartfelt and the considered that both need. Stereophonic doesn't rush. Yet it's so absorbing, affecting and amusing I'd see it again in a heartbeat. ★★★★☆Duke of York's Theatre, London What have you enjoyed at the theatre recently? Let us know in the comments below and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Daily Mail
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
PATRICK MARMION reviews Stereophonic at the Duke of York's Theatre: Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll... all that's missing is Fleetwood Mac
Stereophonic (Duke of York's Theatre, London) Verdict: Goes its own way Welcome to Stereophonic, the ' Fleetwood Mac ' play with music. Now in the West End after winning five Tony Awards on Broadway, it re-creates one of the most notorious episodes of sex, drugs 'n' rock and roll excess in all of pop history: the recording of the band's 1977 album Rumours. In the studio back then, singing and squabbling and much more besides, were Americans Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, alongside Brits Christine and John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood. As you would expect, this gives us lots to get high on in this three-and-a-quarter hour, fly-on-the-wall, dysfunctional re-enactment. But for all the slick, intoxicating staging and a jaunty rock score by Will Butler (formerly of Arcade Fire) played live by the multi-talented cast – there is one very big elephant in the studio. This is not actually Fleetwood Mac (and the name of the fictional band is never mentioned). Lucy Karczewski makes a riveting West End debut as the not-Nicks character 'Diana', combining the innocence of Ariana Grande and the agonies of Adele. She's insidiously controlled by a shady Jack Riddiford as the not-Buckingham character 'Peter' – an insecure 'covert rebel' who was the band's commercial whip-cracker. Chris Stack brings Jeff Bridges vibes to the not-Fleetwood drummer 'Simon'. And as the not-McVies we have booze-sodden Reg (Zachary Hart, falling apart in front of our eyes) and exasperated Holly (Nia Towles). There's also a terrific comic Beavis and Butthead-esque double act from Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler as the two sound mixers, Grover and Charlie. David Adjmi's script gets as close to reality as he probably dared; and Daniel Aukin's production is nothing if not watchable, thanks to a remarkable set by David Zinn. Butler is careful not to expose his score to much comparison, offering mostly musical riffs and snatches. And none of his full-length songs come close to matching the glorious internecine conflict of Go Your Own Way. If only they'd had the rights to Rumours... this really could have been something stunning. Stereophonic runs until October 11. Anna Karenina (Festival Theatre, Chichester) Verdict: Bookish Rating: In Chichester it's not quite Anna Karenina, either. What we want from Leo Tolstoy's 19th-century Russian door-stop is a mad-passionate love story set amid dramatic social upheaval. What we get, in Phillip Breen's artfully experimental production, is academic analysis and fascinating stagecraft. Game Of Thrones star Natalie Dormer lends steeliness and intelligence to the title role of the society woman who scandalises St Petersburg by leaving her husband and child for the catastrophic allure of Count Vronsky (Seamus Dillane, son of Stephen). But their relationship feels bookishly inert. Dormer would have been better off with the man playing the novel's Tolstoy character Levin (David Oakes), who oozes charisma as a reticent man of the country. And Oakes also happens to be Dormer's real-life husband! Mobilising 19 actors over three hours, Breen's script gives up on drama and has characters explain themselves in awkward soliloquies. But it's cleverly performed amid dolls' houses and rocking horses – as well as toy trains, foreshadowing Anna's eventual fate on the tracks. Anna Karenina is on until June 28.
