NINETEEN seventy seven, the year of the Silver Jubilee, my first concert (The Jam at the Village Bowl, Bournemouth) and the year a 14-year- old adolescent first encountered Tom Baker’s Dr Who’s assistant Leela, dressed in little more than was necessary, giving reason alone to tune into BBC1 every Saturday evening. Skip forward 39 years…
PYGMALION is probably the most broadly appealing of all GB Shaw’s plays even if, like me, you inadvertently think of it as My Fair Lady without the songs. Indeed, the dialogue in the musical is so similar to the Shaw original that, almost literally, and more than once too, I half expected the band to…
CAMERON Mackintosh’s “austerity musical” Betty Blue Eyes – a stage reworking of the film A Private Function – looked like a sure-fire hit when it opened in London in 2011 to enthusiastic reviews … but it only lasted six months, to the disappointment and puzzlement of many. It was revived for a provincial tour in…
THE idea of a play which happens in various locations around a town or village, or even a city, is one of the oldest theatrical ideas in this country, with roots going back to Miracle and later Mystery Plays, acted out on carts by local guilds, bringing Bible stories to the masses. When community plays…
Private chef Philippa Davis has just returned from the south of France – in time for English asparagus! LAST week I almost fainted. By instruction of a client I was purchasing some relatively good-looking apples from a trendy west London shop. The fruits were prettily laid out in pristine new wicker baskets and they had an…
FULL steam ahead is the only way to approach Shakespeare’s early salutary comedy The Taming of the Shrew, in which he lays down the ground plans for Much Ado About Nothing. And that is just how it’s done in Adela Forestier-Walker’s production for the Athenaeum Limelight Players in Warminster, on stage in Wiltshire before its…
THEY have done it again. Anything I have ever seen by The Swan’s own company of actors has been at the top of any standard you may choose to measure it by. Even if you know nothing about theatre, and would not usually dream of spending any time in one, I would urge anyone to…
BOB Carlton’s musical adaptation of the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, itself loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was developed at the London Bubble Theatre in the early 1980s, and made its way to the West End via Liverpool’s Everyman. I first heard of it on Woman’s Hour – the fact that a female, in the…
TENEBRAE is, without doubt, one of the world’s leading vocal ensembles. As well as being winners of this year’s BBC Music Magazine’s Choral Award, even the most cursory look at their catalogue of recordings will give you some idea of their wide ranging repertoire, the many other accolades they have received and of the superlatives…
GEORGE Etheridge’s astonishingly amoral play for London’s 17th century selfie generation has a promenade production in a former Christian Scientist Church to mark the end of studies for a talented and versatile group of AUB students. The Man of Mode is all about a rake, Doriment, whose popularity with the ladies is unbounded. He has…