Coffee-Table Notes

Tav Falco may make his living as a Tango teacher in Vienna, but the role of dancer and choreographer are just two more notches on the Curriculum Vitae of an artistic polymath who can also include writer, actor, film-maker and artist on what is no-doubt a sepia-tinted document that's been passed around town like a dirty postcard more than once. Top of the list, however, must be Falco's status as avant-blues singer, musical iconoclast and leader for more than thirty years of the ever-changing band of low-slung retro-nouveau rockers known as Panther Burns. For his first dates in Scotland in a couple of lifetimes, Falco brings an all-European band to town in a show that may more resemble an old-time revue than a fleapit or garden gig, featuring as it does a top notch Tango display by Falco himself, while a band that wouldn't look out of place at a bump n' grind burlesque night in a David Lynch film plays on. Falco may have crawled straight out of Memphis, th...

The potency of cheap music is something Martin Duncan is more than well-versed in. The last time the veteran director of theatre and opera was last in Edinburgh was in 2007 with a production of Dale Wasserman, Joe Darrion and Mitch Leigh's lesser-spotted 1965 musical, Man of La Mancha, featuring the now classic standard, The Impossible Dream. Now Duncan returns to the Royal Lyceum Theatre with a new look at Noel Coward's honeymoon-set rom-com, Private Lives, in which one of Coward's most popular songs, Some Day I'll Find You, makes an appearance. During his time as co artistic director of Chichester Festival Theatre between 2002 and 2005, Duncan directed the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers and Cole Porter's Out Of This World, and won a Best Musical award for How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. Elsewhere, Duncan directed Sondheim at 80 for the BBC Proms, as well as touring his production of The Rocky Horror Show to Munich and Mi...

Pop entryism moves in mysterious ways. When Lloyd Cole appeared on televisual cultural relativist musical barometer Later...With Jools Holland in October 2013, sandwiched between John Newman and Anna Calvi, the veteran lord of velveteen louche sang a song called Women's Studies. A typically literate Cole number, Women's Studies is a song steeped in knowingly half-hidden references, and given extra swagger by a backing band called The Leopards. Towards the end of the song, Cole sang how 'If Josef K Was From Edinburgh / And Fast Product From Prague / Well Baby That Would Be Kinda Funny / Or Maybe Not That Funny At All...' The Leopards, featuring former Jazzateers and Bourgie Bourgie guitarist Mick Slaven and ex Aztec Camera bass player Campbell Owens, have a pedigree which includes at different times backing separate solo ventures by guitarist Malcolm Ross and vocalist Paul Haig, both former members of Edinburgh-sired, Kafka-styled post-punk existentialist...

When Rob Churm, Raydale Dower and Tony Swain opened up Le Drapeau Noir for the duration of the 2010 Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, the nightly word of mouth happenings that took place in the former hairdresser's shop down a city centre back street became as legendary as the forbears they emulated, paid homage to and reinvented for the moment via a series of gigs, performances and events in a speak-easy environment tailor-made for underground conspiracy. Le Drapeau Noir drew inspiration from Dada-ist nightclub Cabaret Voltaire, founded in Zurich by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings in 1916. With Le Drapeau Noir translating as The Black Flag, referencing the anarchist flag as much as American hardcore band, Black Flag, the spirit of anarchist talking shops and any late night boho dive where dreamers and schemers have plotted assorted invisible insurrections for centuries were also in the minds of Churm, Dower and Swain. All of which should make Continue without...

Once upon a time, fringe theatre was alternative in both form and content. Radical collectives brought together by one form of counter-cultural ideology or another attempted to change the world with non-hierarchical structures which they attempted to implement both in the rehearsal room and the office, if they had one. The rise of free-market economics and the allure of public funding forced such companies to professionalise in a way that may have allowed them to join the party, but which arguably neutered the whole notion of alternative and fringe theatre entirely. Such notions of the contradictions inherent in the system interested theatre-maker Jo Ronan when she worked for various theatre companies in the 1990s, when, despite a seemingly radical agenda in terms of productions, the accepted hierarchies and pecking orders remained in place. Several years on, such ideas of what it means to make truly collaborative theatre are explored in Leave Your Shoes At The Door, a w...

Kilmardinny Arts Centre, Bearsden Four stars Local heroes come in many guises. Most of them are in this brand new ceilidh play, ostensibly written and directed by Kieran Hurley, but, as is made clear from the off, with crucial artistic input from fellow performers Gav Prentice, Julia Taudevin and Drew Wright. The quartet are already mucking about as the audience enter designer Lisa Sangster's cosy replication of a Scotch sitting room, singing and playing folk songs old and new. Once the four have set out their store, they introduce us to a set of individuals, each of whom in their own way in search of something or somewhere to belong to. On one level, the fact that both these brave new worlds might just be called Scotland is incidental. Yet such sense of place is also crucial to Howard the Braveheart-weaned American, Miriam the bus-riding immigrant, MacPherson the Methill drunk and all the others who map out a small nation on the verge of something or other. In the w...

Edinburgh Playhouse Four stars First ladies have been much in the news of late. Yet the contemporary soap opera allure of these sometime powers behind the thrones of male politicians is mere tittle-tattle compared to the dramatic life of Eva Peron. Lyricist Tim Rice and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber were clearly drawn to such interesting lives, as both Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar had made clear. Almost forty years after the pair's final and greatest collaboration, Evita remains both of its time and profoundly prophetic in its depiction of one woman's unflinching ambition and her ascent to greatness. The brush-strokes may be broad in Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright's fine touring production, but is full of well-choreographed nuance as it flits through Argentina's volatile mid twentieth century history that so shaped Eva before it killed her. As played by a vibrant Madalena Alberto, Eva has a drive to escape her humb...