By BRUCE DENNILL RedFest 2017: Helen Of Troyeville & Kate Normington – Live At Parlour Songs / Directed by Lesedi Job & Rowan Bakker (respectively) / Redhill School, Johannesburg The RedFest arts festival is now in its second year, expanding both is programme and its ...
By BRUCE DENNILL King Kong / Directed by Jonathan Munby / Joburg Theatre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg The phrase “long-awaited” is generally over-used in publicity bilge in a pointless attempt, perhaps, to convince readers that their lives have been oddly empty without whatever those words precede. In this ...
By BRUCE DENNILL Justice League: Cosmic Clash (PG) 7.5 Open Season: Scared Silly (A) 7 Molly Moon & The Incredible Book Of Hypnotism 3 Max (PGV) 6.5 The Gooey Lunchbox 6.5 Ratchet & Clank 6 It sounds like a cynical – and silly – marketing gimmick, but the combination of ...
By BRUCE DENNILL Composer and playwright Alice Gillham’s new musical Calling Me Home recently completed its first run – a brief installation at the Joburg Theatre in Braamfontein, where it met with mixed reviews. The piece was initially something Gillham was asked to put together ...
By BRUCE DENNILL Forgotten Heritage by Matthew Emmett 5.5 Abandoned Asylums by Matt Van der Velde 6.5 After The Final Curtain by Matt Lambros ...
0By BRUCE DENNILL Composer and playwright Alice Gillham’s new musical Calling Me Home recently completed its first run – a brief installation at the Joburg Theatre in Braamfontein, where it met with mixed reviews. The piece was initially ...
0By BRUCE DENNILL Blogger. It’s a term that’s almost spat out, like a condition you might catch if you discuss it for too long. As media platforms go, blogs are often classed somewhere between penis enlargement flyers pasted ...
0In a career spanning 50 years and over 80 books, Stephen King has amassed a towering reputation as one of our greatest storytellers. The author of innumerable bestsellers, he has been honoured by the President of the ...
0Unesco’s World Heritage Committee recently inscribed eight new sites on their List: one transnational site (in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan), and others in Canada, Chad, China, Iraq, Iran, Mexico and Sudan. The newly inscribed natural sites are: Hubei Shennongjia (China)—Located in Hubei ...
0By STEFAN VOS I initially toyed with the idea of doing this review as a sip-by-sip commentary, the enjoyment of a bottle of Scotch whisky (sticklers note: no ‘e’) in real time. As I envisioned how this ...
0The Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) has been working feverishly up to the forthcoming celebration of the centenary of the famous Sir Edwin Lutyens building, the grand custom-built housing for the original Foundation Collection at JAG. JAG’s dedicated staff, led by chief curator Antoinette Murdoch, has pulled out
0By BRUCE DENNILL Broken Monsters Charity Art Show / Nando’s Central Kitchen, Lorentzville, Johannesburg It’s a simple, heartfelt formula, mixing fame, literature, talent and fine art to
0A previously unseen sculpture of two lizards by Dutch sculptor Anton van Wouw (below) surfaced for auction at Russell Kaplan Auctioneers in Johannesburg earlier this
7 By BRUCE DENNILL Canadian singer, songwriter and guitarist Ian Thornley’s journey with his band Big Wreck has been multi-monikered: Big Wreck, then Ian Thornley (solo), then Ian Thornley & Big Wreck and now back under the single banner again. Whatever the finer details, that ...
6 By BRUCE DENNILL I had two interactions with Chris Cornell. The first was after his set at the My Coke Fest music festival in Johannesburg in 2008, perhaps the most exciting reason ever to go to a racetrack in Alberton. I was covering the ...
4 Barry Ronge was recently recognised for his work as a writer, critic, columnist and commentator at the Sunday Times Literary Awards. He was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award further honoured by the renaming of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, now the Barry ...
4 What is Christian music? How is it different from music made by Christians? Is it different from church music? And why is it usually quite bad? As a worship leader, these are the sorts of questions I like to bore people to death ...
4 By BRUCE DENNILL West Side Story / Directed by Matthew Wild / Mandela, Joburg Theatre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg There’s a good deal of nostalgia involved in watching West Side Story. It’s unavoidable. It’s a 60-year-old stage musical based on a 420-year-old story (Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet) ...
3 Ben Trovato’s the hilarious misguided misogynist whose Sunday Times column thrilled and amused readers for years. Mark Verbaan is the man behind the persona, and his new book, The Memoirs Of Ben Trovato, suggests there was more to the man in the hat’s ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL Bohemian Rhapsody / Directed by Alan Swerdlow / Studio, Pieter Torien’s Montecasino Theatre, Fourways, Johannesburg Queen’s greatest single musical legacy, Bohemian Rhapsody – the song – remains at or near the top of annual “Best Songs Of All Time, Ever!” lists. This ...
2 There were several moments on the Otter Trail where I looked up and thought: “This is tougher than I thought it would be.” When the pack I was carrying bit into my shoulders and my trail runners just wouldn’t grip on the wet ...
2 BY BRUCE DENNILL Blonde Poison / Directed by Janna Ramos-Violante / Auto & General Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg This moving one-hander by Gail Louw stars Fiona Ramsay as Stella Goldschlag, a septuagenarian German Jew who, while awaiting the arrival of a journalist interested ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL Impact No. 1 / Tshwane Dance Theatre, Cape Dance Company and Moving Into Dance Mophatong / Joburg Theatre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg When it is possible to see a full-scale contemporary dance programme on one of South Africa’s major stages, it becomes clearer than ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL Changing your personal brand from the relative edginess of being in an alternative rock or punk band to joining the ranks of the (again – relatively speaking) “elder statesmen” of rock – Madam G even sounds a little like Leonard Cohen: ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL Morecambe / Studio Theatre, Montecasino / Starring Craig Urbani / Directed by Alan Swerdlow The obvious challenge to mounting a show about British comedian and variety star Eric Morcambe is the source material’s vintage (Morecambe and Wise began their partnership in 1941 ...
2 By ROB HOFMEYR The Road To En-Dor by EH Jones 6 The Texture Of Shadows by Mandla Langa 8 What About Meera by ZP Dala 6 What Will People Say? by Rehana Rossouw ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL “Tells” – in the poker sense – is an interesting word to use as a title for an artist whose utterances are often misunderstood or wilfully misconstrued. And what’s even more curious is that much of this music was written a ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL JT Lawrence’s latest book Why You Were Taken paints the South Africa of 2021 as a difficult place for a person who knows his or her own mind. It’s an invigorating, bracing vision by a very talented storyteller. The creation of a new ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL Glen Phillips, once and occasionally present Toad The Wet Sprocket frontman, has released a poetic, honest new solo album called Swallowed By The New, on which he examines heartbreak, depression, grief and, ultimately, hope. You’ve talked about – as part of the processing ...
2 Jeremiah Goldswain Most people have little knowledge about an ancestor four generations removed but Ralph Goldswain has come to know his great, great grandfather very well. His edition of Jeremiah’s memoirs – The Chronicle of Jeremiah Goldswain, 1820 Settler – has just been published. “It’s thrilling, especially as ...
2 Arriving at a studio to record your own original music is mostly incredibly exciting, but also a little nerve-wracking. Are you properly rehearsed? Will your voice last? Will the sound of a nearby electric gate opening and closing drive you to distraction? Time ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL Phillip Phillips 8 The Script 6.5 The Dome / Johannesburg / 4 February The Script returned to South Africa after a four-year break in which they went from radio-friendly pop lady-pleasers, to really successful radio-friendly pop lady-pleasers with a large fanbase of very dedicated ...
2 By JM SHORNEY Until today, in my sheltered writer’s existence, I had not encountered any reference to the group who call themselves Anonymous. The members don Guy Fawkes masks, which I suppose lends an eerie but historic message, as Guy and his co-conspirators were ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL Other than a cup of what is presumably coffee, Josh Groban makes no concessions to fatigue after a full day’s travel from Los Angeles, via Heathrow, to Johannesburg. His chatty, friendly stage persona is shown to be an extension of his ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL Marlene Wasserman, akaDr Eve, has, it appears, been seduced (intellectually, anyway) by the data in her latest book, Cyber Infidelity. She was able to put the book – which is really more of an academic work including saucy case studies – ...
2 There are two things that annoy me about audiences in South Africa. The first thing is that they consider a local cast to be inferior to an international one. Nowhere close to true! The second is that they don’t support student productions. They need convincing them ...
2 By BRUCE DENNILL A song is worth a thousand words. Or something. Below is a song I wrote about 2014 – not an easy period – with a demo for free download at the bottom of the page. Enjoy. Comments welcome/hoped for/useful. Centre Stage © Bruce Dennill, ...
2 Airport angst. It’s a thing. Anyone who’s felt annoyed when they’ve had to arrive at a placed composed primarily of tiles and x-ray machines four hours before they’ll be able to leave it ahead of an international flight has suffered from this condition. The bulk of ...
1 By ROB HOFMEYR Hazel Crampton: The Side Of The Sun At Noon Hazel Crampton is known for her outstanding The Sunburnt Queen, an account of a little English girl shipwrecked on the Wild Coast. This new work has a greater scope both historically and geographically, but ...
1 By BRUCE DENNILL Dieter Daehnke: Journey Of A Stickman All books are about journeys, one way or another. Dieter Daehnke’s recollections of his experiences on the Camino – the pilgrim’s trek from various points in Europe to the giant cathedral in Santiago de Compostela that supposedly ...
1 The trick Steven Boykey Sidley got right in his first book, Entanglement, and has continued to refine via second release Stepping Out and through to this third effort, is to make small dramas feel extravagantly exciting and involving. All of his books involve men ...
1 By BRUCE DENNILL A Spartacus Of Africa / Choreographed by Veronica Paeper and David Krugel / Joburg Theatre, Johannesburg The story of the Thracian – Thrace was an area overlapping parts of modern Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece – slave, gladiator and revolutionary Spartacus, re-imagined as ...
1 By TAMMY BALLANTYNE Dance Umbrella 2015 Double bill: The Architecture of Tears and fight, flight, feathers, f***ers March 3 and 4, Dance Factory Images of flight, buoyancy, human bodies airborne, pervaded this double bill at Dance Factory. During Dance Umbrella, we accept that it’s a platform for ...
