SHIVER me timbers, there’s some piratical goings on in deepest Stur. The evil one-legged Long John Silver and his fiendish crew have recruited the WI to join the crew of the Hispanola and blood is sure to be spilled! SNADS has chosen Ben Crocker’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s great adventure story and it’s an…
WE wanted to see The Favourite, we wanted to see it in a proper cinema, not eventually on a DVD or on the tiny screen of a long-distance flight – and we wanted to try out the sofas at Yeovil’s Westlands entertainment centre. So last week we went to Westlands to see The Favourite, and…
AS part of an audience I’m a nightmare as far as anyone presenting comedy is concerned, because even when I’m enjoying the comedy very much, I rarely laugh out loud. Mischief Theatre’s production of The Play That Went Wrong was an exception to that rule, their wonderfully-timed mimed comedy forcing guffaws of laughter from me…
STARTING life in 2001 as an autobiographical novel by an American girl whose bubbly personality and obsession with fashion and beauty had made her the laughing stock of fellow students at Stanford law school, Legally Blonde rapidly became a hit film and then an internationally successful musical. Eighteen years on and I must confess to…
LIKE many supporters of Arsenal Football Club, and their manager Arsene Wenger, I have been frustrated by their performances over the past few seasons where time after time inconsistency and individual errors have prevented them from attaining the heights their undoubted talents deserved. The result was that after 21years in charge, during which he had…
Schumann Manfred Overture Dvořák Violin Concerto Brahms Symphony No. 2 Conductor Clemens Schuldt Baiba Skride, violin “PASTORAL Brahms”, we were promised by the programme. Brahms’s second symphony was written hard on the heels of his long-awaited first in 1877 when the composer was in his mid-forties. It is often seen as a relaxed, pastoral piece,…
ALFRED Hitchcock’s 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, adapted for the stage by Antony Lampard, is currently touring in a production directed by Roy Marsden. It opens in an Austrian railway station, impressively designed by Morgan Large and atmospherically lit by Charlie Morgan Jones. There has been an avalanche and the train is delayed. The Anschluss…
SYRIAN music is not something most of us have the opportunity to hear live, at least not on our native soil. The last time I had the chance to hear anything remotely similar to last night’s concert was almost 30 years ago now – just outside Aleppo in fact – but that’s another story. Suffice…
SUGGEST to most people, including lovers of ballet and show dancing, that they come to an evening of Modern Contemporary Dance and they would probable have made a dash for the door before you could go into details of the programme on offer. Such a blinkered approach robs many a dance enthusiast of the pleasure…
THIS is the third or fourth time I have heard and enjoyed the music of the Pagoda Project. Although the ensemble appears in a number of different manifestations, the linchpins are invariably the same – the charismatic and highly versatile duo of Karen Wimhurst (clarinets) and Paul Hutchinson (accordion). As their website says, Pagoda Project…