WORLD domination is a big theme at the moment, so what more apt pantomime than Aladdin, whose villain is a manipulative megalomaniac with global ambitions. The difference between those on the real international stage and the one at Bath’s Theatre Royal is that Bill Ward’s Abanazar is funny and drop-dead gorgeous. Spectacle, fun and excitement…
YOU might think you know all about Robin Hood, a historic hero with little relevance to the 21st century. But how wrong you would be, as the egg theatre’s Christmas show proves. This new version, created by Greg Banks and performed by four actors backed by an all-female ska band, underlines the fact that the legendary…
IT hardly seems two years ago that I had the privilege of attending the premiere of Jools Scott’s and Sue Curtis’ oratorio The Cool Web in the magnificent surroundings of Bath Abbey. Based on the work of Robert Graves, The Cool Web was without doubt one of the most moving tributes to the fallen I…
SALLY Cookson’s reworking of the stories of Cinderella and The Ash Girl, Cinderella – A Fairytale, returns to the Tobacco Factory in Southville after its sell-out performances in 2011, and before it even opened a further week was added to the run to accommodate demand for tickets. With no element of pantomime, this is a…
TAUNTON’S Brewhouse re-enters its life as a producing theatre with a steampunk musical version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, on stage until 31st December. Tim Claydon has directed and choreographed the show, which opened at Battersea Arts Centre in 2001, written by Phil Willmott and Annemarie Thomas and based on Verne’s…
POOLE’S Lighthouse has a growing reputation for circus arts, so it is no surprise that the homegrown pantomime for 2016/17 starts in a circus, with all its thrills and spills. But before long the acrobats realise that it is Aladdin they are supposed to be performing, and the audience is whisked off to an old…
THERE are few more delightful things to see over the Christmas period than the faces of excited children just waiting for the next surprise. And few places where it happens more often than in the theatre. In the Colston Hall’s Lantern, Bristol Old Vic and Wardrobe Theatre are performing an adaptation of Edward Ardizzone’s Little…
IT has been a long time since Bristol Old Vic staged a traditional Christmas pantomime, leaving that genre to the glitzy and expensive Hippodrome. Audiences have come to expect something different at the old theatre in King Street, and this year’s offering, a radical reworking of The Snow Queen, won’t disappoint. If BOV has a…
I OFTEN joke that were Her Majesty to nod to me in the honours lists, I’d have to skip the MBEs and OBEs and go straight to a Damehood, so many pantomimes have I reviewed in my career. So it is with delight that I can say that Salisbury Playhouse’s Aladdin, on until 7th January,…
THE story of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, is the 2016/17 popular choice for Christmas shows, and at Exeter, director Paul Jepson has taken most of Frederick Gaines’s stage adaptation and infused his own message of feminism and the pan-sexuality that Christine and the Queens have brought into this week’s news….