Prospero

“LA LA Land”, Damien Chazelle’s candy-coloured tribute to the musicals of Tinseltown’s golden age, arrives at a sensitive moment in Hollywood history. Buoyed by a freewheeling score from Justin Hurwitz and the chemistry of its leads, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, the film is up for seven awards at this weekend’s Golden Globes, and has been widely tipped for Oscar glory. What’s more, if the film is a hit (as early box-office takings suggest), it could put the twinkle back in the toes of a genre long since viewed with suspicion by studios, who prefer their musicals to come packaged with pre-written pop smashes (“Pitch Perfect”, “Mamma Mia!”) if they make them at all.

WHEN Esther Anderson, the co-founder of Island Records, first heard him sing in a hotel room in Kingston in 1972, she knew she had not seen the likes of Bob Marley before. She also knew that she had found a kindred spirit: someone who shared her love of Rastafarianism and sought to bring those ideals to others. Thus began a six-year musical and artistic collaboration; while the Wailers worked on their seminal first albums for Island Records, Ms Anderson quietly documented their everyday lives. A new collection of these intimate photographs is now on display at the Dadiani Fine Art gallery in London.

THERE is a unique quality to the light in Australia. The sky seems bluer than it should, and the landscape leaps at you with golden browns, burnt oranges and warm yellows. The sun’s rays burn and destroy, but also illuminate and comfort. It is something Australians instantly identify as a symbol of their home. Now at the National Gallery in London, as winter shrouds the capital’s skyline with grey, an exhibition full of this distinctive light is on show. “Australia’s Impressionists” is the collected work of four 19th-century artists. Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and John Russell, although highly regarded down under, have remained relatively unknown in Europe. This display should help change that. 

FEW Christmas songs temper the joy and light of the festive season with the dark realities of modern life. Most “wish it could be Christmas everyday”, or point out “what fun it is to laugh and sing a sleighing song”. “In the Bleak Midwinter” is rather different; sombre and earnest in tone, it offers up themes of hope and strife in equal measure. In a 2008 BBC poll, “In the Bleak Midwinter” won the title of “Best Christmas Carol”. Yet the 110-year-old carol’s snow-and-straw depiction of the arrival of the Christ child continues to resonate beyond the religious to move music lovers of all kinds. 

THE big screen hungers for them, the small screen is addicted and the stage would not survive without a constant supply of adaptations of novels and films. If it is true that there are only seven basic plots in fiction, it is hardly surprising that the performing arts are one big recycling plant. But what happens when a story makes the journey from one medium to another and back again? What happens to its DNA along the way?

Warning: this article contains plot details of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”

WHEN George Lucas sold the rights to the “Star Wars” franchise to Walt Disney a few years ago, the space opera’s devotees were almost as excited as Disney’s accountants. The sale meant that there would, at last, be three more Episodes of the blockbuster saga which Mr Lucas began in 1977. And that wouldn’t be all. Never a company to under-exploit its intellectual property, Disney announced that it would release one new “Star Wars” Episode every two years, thus continuing the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and their pals. But in the intervening years it would release supplementary “Star Wars” films which didn’t revolve around the main characters, and which weren’t designated as Episodes with a Roman numeral in the title.

IMMATURE, brassy, vulnerable and often sexualised, adolescent girls tend to travel in packs. Members of this exotic species speak in their own patois, peppering their speech with terms such as “like”, “’kay” and “ew” and presenting their statements like questions. It is easy to confuse their bonding rituals with hazing rites, particularly as both demand deference to an explicit yet unspoken pecking order. For a perfect rendering of these creatures in the wild, head swiftly to see “The Wolves”, one of the most charming plays on any of New York’s stages right now, both on Broadway and off.