THE deadline for entries to the 2023 Somerset Food Trail is on Wednesday 15th March. The food trail, which last year attracted 8,500 people to visit more than 190 sustainable food producers and retailers, runs from 14th to 30th July and focuses on smaller scale and more nature-friendly farmers and artisan producers. The 2023 trail…
THERE are just a handful of musicals which, like great actors, dominate the stage the moment they appear, standing head and shoulders above the rest of the herd. My Fair Lady, along with Oklahoma and Show Boat, is such a musical. No one-hit-wonder this show, a big success when first produced, but rarely seen afterwards….
DOUGIE Scarfe, chief executive of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, will have been with the Poole-based regional orchestra for ten years this year – and the celebrations began in style when he was named Orchestra Manager of the Year at the ABO/Classical Music Awards in Leeds. This prestigious award recognises his work in championing inclusion and…
WHEN a stage play is rapidly turned into a wildly successful movie, it is very hard for the average audience to rid its memory of the images of the starry leading actors. So it is with Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, immortalised in 1990 on film by Dolly Parton, Olympia Dukakis, Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Shirley…
ALAN Ayckbourn is as popular as he is prolific, so it’s no great surprise, as a reviewer, to see two of his plays in quick succession. An interesting contrast, though, as the productions (both excellent) are his first big success Relatively Speaking, which was at Bath, and How The Other Half Loves, at Salisbury Playhouse,…
THE members of Salisbury’s Studio Youth Theatre chose Russ Tunney’s highly-praised adaptation of Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (the first of her long series of Wolves books) for the first show of 2023, on at the theatre in Ashley Road until Saturday 18th February. Set in a time that never was – the…
Akimenko Nocturne Glazunov From the Middle Ages: Prelude Tanayev St John of Damascus Shostakovich Symphony No 4 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Bournemouth Symphony Chorus Kiril Karabits: Conductor LAST month the BSO announced that Kiril Karabits would be ending his tenure as chief conductor in the summer of 2024 after 15 years. Karabits’s…
THE current touring production of Phil Porter’s adaptation of The Lavender Hill Mob started its national progress last October and ends next weekend in Cornwall. Directed by Jeremy Sams, it stars Miles Jupp and Justin Edwards with a further six multi-role-playing actors to bring to life this stage version of the classic 1951 Ealing comedy,…
PLANS to create an Avalon Agroecological Area, within a five-mile radius of Glastonbury, bringing together farmers, growers, conservationists and local councils will be launched at Glastonbury Town Hall on 19th March. The aim of the project, called 5FF (5 miles farming and food), is to support local farmers and food growers to embrace more nature-…
SALCOMBE Brewery Co has launched a new spiced farmhouse ale, Saison (ABV 5.5%), which will be available on tap in pubs and from retail outlets. Head brewer Sam Beaman says this spiced ale is the fourth and final ale in Salcombe’s new small batch range: “Saison style ales originated in the farmhouses of Wallonia, the…