Critics’ Choice: Your pick of nights out

Published on 06/12/2012 00:00

Our team of critics offer their suggestions for the pick of the nights out.

THEATRE

PUSS IN BOOTS

BRUNTON THEATRE, MUSSELBURGH, UNTIL 5 JANUARY

FANCY a cosy, traditional family panto with no frills but lots of heart? Then hie thee to the Brunton at Musselburgh, where they’re offering a Puss In Boots set firmly in and around The Honest Toun, with settings and dialogue to match. Budgets are modest in Musselburgh, and sometimes it shows, in both production and performance; but Tim Licata’s production has a sweet-faced Dame, a smashing wicked witch, plenty of jolly songs with a hilarious East Lothian twist, and an excellent chorus of local youth theatre kids, thrown in for good measure.

• Tel: [phone]

JOYCE MCMILLAN

FILM

TRADING PLACES

GLASGOW FILM THEATRE, TOMORROW

Remember when Eddie Murphy was funny, Dan Aykroyd was thin and Christmas movies weren’t automatically turkeys? The GFT does, hence this rare late night screening of Trading Places, one of the finest comedies from the 1980s and a bona fide yuletide classic. Aykroyd is the young investment banker who has his life ruined by his malevolent bosses (Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy) when they give his job and home to a bum (Murphy) as part of a nature v nurture bet they’ve made with each other. What follows is a lot of raucous humour (including brilliant performances from Jamie Lee Curtis and an extra dry Denholm Elliot), an uplifting seasonal message and – for extra cheer – a plot in which greedy bankers get their comeuppance. Merry New Year!

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ALISTAIR HARKNESS

VISUAL ART

FERAL LANDSCAPE

EDINBURGH PRINTMAKERS, UNTIL 22 DECEMBER

Edinburgh Printmakers’ Christmas show is the largest annual exhibition of work by members of the workshop. It is not just any work though. It is a themed show and the theme this year, according to the press release, is “the edgy domain of the feral landscape; where the natural and manmade, the tamed and untameable fuse.” The inspiration seems to have been provided by two adopted and only partly domesticated feral cats: an intriguing metaphor for contemporary art, perhaps.

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DUNCAN MACMILLAN

CLASSICAL

ARTUR PIZARRO & THE SCOTTISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

QUEEN’S HALL, EDINBURGH, TONIGHT; CITY HALLS, GLASGOW, TOMORROW; ABERDEEN MUSIC HALL, 7 DECEMBER

If ANYTHING warrants a visit to the SCO this week, it’s the return of pianist Artur Pizarro to perform Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto. His recordings of the Beethoven concertos with the SCO and the late Sir Charles Mackerras were a knockout. Here, however, he teams up with the impressive Finnish conductor Jon Storgårds, who also conducts Mendelssohn’s glorious Reformation Symphony and Rautavaara’s The Heart of Light.

• Tel: [phone] (Edinburgh); 0141-353 8000 (Glasgow); 01224 651122 (Aberdeen)

KENNETH WALTON

POP

THE BLACK KEYS

SECC, GLASGOW, 8 DECEMBER

It SEEMS that everyone needs at least one guitar/drums power blues garage duo in their lives and, since the demise of The White Stripes, The Black Keys from Akron, Ohio have been anointed as the people’s choice. Current album El Camino is a mighty beast, not just in terms of no holds barred rock power but in its audacious pop boldness. The question is not will singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney manage to fill the vast, forbidding space of the SECC’s largest hall, but will the SECC be able to contain The Black Keys?

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FIONA SHEPHERD