ROBERT Harling’s semi-autobiographical play Steel Magnolias is set in the beauty parlour of a town in the made-up Chinquapin Parish of Louisiana, in reality Natchitoches, with its big sister Shreeveport up the road for the Christmas Lights Festival. It’s a brilliant play, with its cast of six women, and it was transferred to the big…
FROME Drama Club has grabbed the chance to enlist young Anabella Fairgrieve and put her centre stage in a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and the result is a triumph. Incredibly assured for one so young (she’s only 16), this enormously talented actress is headed for the top, and it’s a delight to see…
IT is easy to make fun of the TV series Benidorm, describing it as shallow, appealing to the lowest sense of humour, always looking for the cheapest easy laugh available and very non-PC in its humour, but there has to be more than that to it in order for it to survive eleven series attracting…
ALTHOUGH 20 years separate the formation of these groups and one is a trio, albeit for this concert they were added to by a guest viola player, and the other is a quartet, they have quite a deal in common. The Amatis are part of the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Young Artist Scheme which…
THE South West Wiltshire MP Dr Andrew Murrison is one of 508 MPs who are planting trees as part of the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy, a network of forest conservation initiatives to mark Her Majesty’s lifetime of service to the Commonwealth. Dr Murrison has planted silverbirch and rowan trees in Biss Meadows Country Park in Trowbridge….
THE views of Jurgen Klopp, manager of Premier League club Liverpool, on the subject of early kick offs are well known. He dislikes them intensely. This is reflected incidentally in the patchy results teams under his management have achieved. With that in mind, I wondered about the wisdom of asking the three bright young musicians…
NICOLA Werenowska’s powerful exploration of displacement and identity across three generations of a Polish family, Silence, reaches the end of its ten-venue tour at Salisbury, where it is on stage at the Salberg Studio until 17th November. Maria lived in Warsaw as Poland was invaded by both Germany and Russia, and she and her husband…
ENGLISH Touring Opera’s production of Handel’s 1720 opera Radamisto, loosely based on incidents in the Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome, is a musical, vocal and visual triumph. This opera seria, the first written by the German composer for the Royal Academy of Music in his adopted homeland, is the story of a tyrant, King Tiridate…
THE word feast could well be substituted for ‘Fest’ which follows Mozart, the composer at the heart of this annual festival now in its 28th year, on all the publicity material for the Bath’s Mozart Fest. Once again artistic director Amelia Freedman has brought a dazzling array of musical talent to the City of Bath…
IT was a dark and stormy night … the winds whipped monsoon-like rains across the South Wessex Ridgeway downs into pools across the road and the little hall shook. Not a night to be out … But it takes more than a wintry storm to keep the people of Wootton Fitzpaine away from an Artsreach…