HANDEL’s Agrippina is a dark story about family jealousies and treachery, extra-marital liaisons and power plotting – so what more natural updating than to the days of Dynasty! That’s how director Bruno Ravella envisaged the final opera in the 2015 Iford Festival, with Alinka Kozari in the title role done up like Joan-Collins-as-Alexis, her rival…
WHENEVER American broadcasters or politicians talk about Washington DC they always call it “our nation’s capital” and they don’t walk they “power strut,” as Dorset-born travelling chef Philippa Davis discovered on her recent visit to this beautiful city on the Potomac river. In all my travels I have never seen so many dashing three-piece…
WHATEVER the weather, you are guaranteed hot stuff at Littlebredy on Friday 21st August, when cookery writer and teacher Christine McFadden, aka the Dorset Foodie, is running her Cooking with Chillies class. The one-day session, from 9.15am to 3.30pm, is a must for chilli heads! Participants will be cooking and tasting a fascinating range of chillies…
HIDDEN in a peaceful corner of south west Wiltshire, Pythouse Kitchen Garden is sometimes compared with the famous Petersham Nurseries at Richmond. It’s not an unfair comparison – both are restaurants serving contemporary, seasonal and local food in beautiful gardens. If you haven’t visited this lovely spot, at Hatch near Tisbury, it’s worth a visit,…
WHO wants to be trapped in a small town in Colorado where the most exciting thing to happen is the tumbleweed blowing down Main, when there’s a chance of global big business on the horizon. That’s the American Dream, and its one that nasty Nate Milton has every night. But his double-crossing ways don’t fool…
ONE of the great pleasures about shopping at farmers’ markets is that you get to know the people who make the food you are buying. This is stating the obvious, I know, but it never ceases to amaze me that there are those out there who are prepared to work punishing hours, to forego holidays,…
THE devil, as they say, gets all the best tunes, and in Ben Occhipinti’s production of Gounod’s Faust, he also gets the best makeup, best movement and most charisma. In the person of young Scottish bass-baritone Colin Brockie, it’s all too easy to see the attraction of Mephistopheles’ promises, and setting the updated but timeless…
THREE of Alan Bennett’s brilliant monologues from the Talking Heads series make up the second show of the Bath Theatre Royal Summer Season, and on until Saturday 8th August. Lady of Letters, which starts the performance, has Siobhan Redmond as the lonely busybody Miss Ruddock. Trapped in her bare flat and alone after the death…
HAVING had such success with Dreamboats and Petticoats, the “juke box” musical written by sitcom experts Marks and Gran (Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart) full of songs from the 1950s which has spawned seven hit albums of such music, producer, and, for this show, director, Bill Kenwright has now worked with the same writers…
AS the audience flooded out of the Coade Hall at Bryanston School on Saturday afternoon, a universal smile of happiness on their faces, it was clear that the 2015 production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore was a triumph. It was one of those productions where everything gelled, a delight for the ears and the eyes and…