IT’s easy to see why young performers love Bugsy Malone, the Prohibition era musical first seen as a 1976 movie by Alan Parker, with an all-child cast including Jodie Foster as the singer Tallulah. It’s got catchy songs, great dance rhythms, an exciting story with speakeasies, warring bar-owners, gangsters armed with cream-shooting splurge guns and…
Bizet L’Arlesienne Suite Ravel Piano Concerto in G Prokofiev Autumnal Sketch Mussorgsky (arr. Ravel) Pictures at an Exhibition Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Louis Schwizgebel: Piano It’s great to be back! My last BSO review was posted in January 2020, so last night’s concert was an…
SAY Brooklyn to most people and they picture the dramatic bridge and a New York borough that has gone through several iterations of poverty and crime to its current uber-trendiness. What you probably don’t think about is gentility. But that is precisely what we see in the Brooklyn of Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace,…
THERE are urban dwellers (and maybe country folk) who are really scared of woods. A legendary aunt sat locked in a car in a state of high terror when the rest of the family went for a walk in the New Forest. We have laughed about it many times. But, having just seen Craig White’s…
IF you told Laura and Danny, the characters in David Eldridge’s play Beginning, about agricultural workers from Yorkshire walking over the Pennines to Lancashire every weekend to court their lasses, it would be like discussing ancient history. But, oddly, their dreams and wishes are the same, maybe proving that the more it changes, the more…
LIKE most people, I first came upon Grease when the now legendary film starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John arrived like a bursting meteor of energy in 1978. Big impression as it made, I never expected to find it gathering big audiences in the theatre, well over half of whom were not even born when…
WEST Dorset artisan charcuterie producers Capreolus have once again received a list of two and three stars in this year’s Great Taste Awards, including the prestigious three stars for Wild Venison Chorizo and Dorset Soft Salami. David and Karen Richards, who have been creating delicious artisan charcuterie since 2009, also received three two-star awards for…
THREE outstanding meat products from the South West have received the coveted three stars in the newly announced 2021 Great Taste Awards. The world’s leading food award scheme attracts entries from around the world. This year 14,113 different products, from 108 countries, were judged at the Gillingham HQ of organisers the Guild of Fine Food,…
DIRECTOR Ian White, a life-long lover of the theatre and Shakespeare’s Scottish play in particular, sees the Macbeths as a couple with “a mature and successful marriage” – indeed the only one in the canon. As such, he says, the guilt and the blame for the murderous tyranny that they unleash has to be shared….
WORSHIPPERS at the church of St Mary, on the outskirts of Kilmington just north of Stourhead, walk weekly over the site of a heinous crime committed in Tudor times. Audiences at the three performances of Murder Most Foul have a clearer idea of the story behind the murders of William Hartgill and his son John,…