Front Row Folgen

Maxine Peake discusses her new stage play, Queens of the Coal Age, which dramatizes the incident in 1993 when, armed with wet wipes and nicotine gum, Anne Scargill led a group of women to occupy Parkside Colliery in protest against pit closures.The acclaimed dancer and choreographer, Gillian Lynne, has died aged 92. Best known for Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, she worked on more than 60 shows on Broadway and in the West End. Elaine Paige, Cameron Mackintosh and choreographer Arlene Phillips pay tribute.Kevin Macdonald's film Whitney is released this week, the second documentary in just over a year looking at the icon's life (and demise). While Macdonald's new film is officially supported by the late singer's estate, Nick Broomfield's 2017 Whitney: Can I Be Me?, was unauthorised. Critic Grace Barber-Plentie considers how access and the involvement of the family affected the feeling of the film, and whether the chorus of interviewed voices bought us any closer to understanding Whitney Houston.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Rebecca Armstrong.

Winner of five Tony Awards, Fun Home is a ground-breaking new musical about a lesbian girl coming out, based on Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic novel. Briony Hanson reviews the UK premiere at London's Young Vic theatre.Remarkably, Fun Home is the first Broadway musical with a lesbian protagonist. But are queer women underrepresented in drama in general? Briony is joined by theatre director Hannah Hauer-King to discuss the visibility and portrayal of lesbian characters in theatre, film and TV. The latest novel by the prolific Caryl Phillips, A View of the Empire at Sunset, is a fictional account of the life of Jean Rhys, author of The Wide Sargasso Sea, who came from the West Indies to London in 1906 at the age of sixteen. Caryl Phillips discusses his fascination with Rhys, and how writing her life in this way allows him to observe the decline of the Empire.Ahead of the announcement next week of the winner of the £100,000 Art Fund Museum of the Year 2018, we'll be reporting from each of the five shortlisted museums. Today we hear from Tate St Ives, which originally opened in 1993, but which re-opened to the public last year after two-year architectural extension. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Kate Bullivant.

A Japanese-themed edition of Front Row as the Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose scores include Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Last Emperor, talks to Stig about being inspired by nature, and how he came back from treatment for throat cancer to write the music for The Revenant.The editor of The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, Jay Rubin, tells how he curated the selection and reflects on his career as one of Haruki Murakami's main translators. And Junko Takekawa, Senior Arts Programme Officer at the Japan Foundation and a guest curator at this year's Cheltenham Festival of Literature, selects some of her favourite Japanese novels. The architect Sou Fujimoto describes how the boundaries between nature and buildings, inside and outside, inspire his work - and reveals the artistic potential of a pile of crisps!Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Sarah Johnson.