118 stories by "Jasper Rees"
Marvin Hamlisch's three Oscars all came in 1974. "I think now we can talk to each other as friends," he said as he accepted his third award of the night, packaging his sizeable self-esteem a…
Simon Stephens (b. 1971) is the most prolific British playwright of his generation. Born and brought up in Stockport, he began writing as a student in York University and had produced seven …
Producers did say it was going to be a bad summer for West End theatre, but the announcement of the closure of Chicago is still a curveball. For 15 years the musical - with music by John Kan…
"Let slip the dogs of war." Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev's Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over on the …
We're fresh out of superlatives. The Globe to Globe season has put a girdle around the earth in 37 languages, and the visiting companies have now left the building. You have to high-five the…
Apart from "I did not have sex with that woman" and maybe "It's the economy, stupid", Bill Clinton seems never to have said anything quite as memorable. Indeed, of all the phrases with his n…
The concept sounds like something dreamed up towards the bottom of a bottle in a Harare shebeen: Two Gentlemen of Verona performed by two gentlemen in Shona. If any of the plays can withstan…
One day soon Beatles scholars and Professors of Fabology will emerge from their caverns and their ashrams to inform us that it was 50 years ago today. On 5 October 1962 "Love Me Do" was rele…
Something extraordinary is happening at Shakespeare's Globe. However unlikely the appeal, audiences are flocking to every one of Globe to Globe's visiting productions. But sometimes logic su…
Shakespeare's Coming Home, boasts the strapline of a highly ambitious strand of London 2012's Cultural Olympiad. Between now and 9 June, 37 productions of the complete canon by Shakespeare (…
There'll be no avoiding Chariots of Fire this summer. The Olympics being shortly upon us, Hampstead Theatre are soon to launch a stage verison of the Oscar-winning 1981 film. The success of …
Robert Sherman, who has died at the age of 86, was three years old than his brother Richard. And much much quieter. On the two occasions I interviewed the songwriting brothers " once in pers…
Zach Braff (b 1975) is overwhelmingly known as the star of Scrubs, the hugely popular American hospital comedy which came with a side order of surrealism. But fans of low-budget indie cinema…
Siân Phillips (b 1933) belongs to the remarkable generation of British actresses. They include Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Plowright and Sheila Hancock…
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 " it's not quite right to call them theatre-goers " followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot's own v…
In Rock'n'Roll, the play by Tom Stoppard, two characters haunt the stage without actually appearing on it. One of them, Syd Barrett, absconded from Pink Floyd to lead the life of a hermit. T…
To just about everyone, the name will mean absolutely nothing. "I'm a jobbing actor," he says, and for most of the year it is true. He does little bits of telly, the odd tiny film role, a ce…
There is somewhere called Leighland, where people may be ineffably sad or existentially cheerful, old or young, live in a high rise or a semi. But they are all recognisably inhabitants of th…
