HAVING enjoyed a number of live screenings of plays, musicals and operas over the past few years, I was greatly looking forward to St George’s screening of Richard Strauss’ matchless opera Der Rosenkavalier, or to give it its English title The Knight of the Rose. Not that it could be described as being “live” in…
SPECTACULAR, brilliant and legendary are just three of the words in the publicity for this, the completely revamped tour of the second big show by the writers of Les Miserables. This is the first time I have seen Miss Saigon since just before it closed in 1999, having also seen the very first cast in…
IF you were to pick out two plays that evoke the First World War, in all its horror, carnage, courage, tragedy and inhuman scale, they would be Oh What A Lovely War and Journey’s End. To see these two masterpieces in the space of five days is shattering. Sturminster Newton Amateur Dramatic Society has chosen…
APPEARING at The Forum on a beautiful spring evening was a sort of homecoming for Mary Chapin Carpenter, the American singer-songwriter celebrating 30 years of recording. Her most recent record (she likes to call them “records”) is SometimesJust the Sky, and was made at Real World studio in Box, just up the road from the…
“THERE is magic in this world right here,” says Nick Harper in the concluding verse of his epic poem A Wiltshire Tale, which he performed to a small but enthusiastic audience in St Margaret’s Hall at Bradford on Avon, part of a tour that also includes Bridport Arts Centre on 23rd June and the Larmer…
ARTS University Bournemouth found a unique way to commemorate World War I – by producing Joan Littlewood’s great music theatre satire Oh What a Lovely War with students from the 2014 and now the 2018 performing arts courses. The project was made more exciting by the involvement of Kokoro, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s contemporary music ensemble….
THE audience for the Trowbridge Chorus spring concert, in the elegant and historic setting of St James Church, had a double treat with the baroque glories of masterpieces by Vivaldi and Handel. The concert, conducted by the benign but disciplined Graham Dalby, opened with Vivaldi’s Gloria, a work of transcendent music – even saying “Vivaldi’s Gloria”…
BURYING the Dead, presented by Ceruleo on their short tour of west-country venues as part of the current Concerts in the West season, was a new play by Clare Norburn with music by the late 17th century English composer Henry Purcell. The author describes Burying the Dead as a concert-play and imagines Purcell on his…
THE shiny new Bridge Theatre, across the Thames from the Tower of London, between Tower Bridge and the City Hall, has chosen Barney Norris’s Nightfall as the third play in the opening season. Expectations were high for the prolific young writer’s new work, once again set in the rural south and focussing on current threats…
BY the time audiences saw Joe Orton’s final play, What the Butler Saw, in 1969, the playwright was already dead, murdered by a jealous lover in lurid circumstances. Four years later Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus was first staged. Both plays parody the good old English Whitehall farce with its multiplicity of doors and dropped trousers,…