FARNHAM Maltings’ It’s a Wonderful Life is a reworking of Frank Capra’s classic 1946 film of the same name. The production, which has been touring England and Wales over the past month or so, was brought to North Cadbury Village Hall by Take Art, Somerset’s highly enterprising arts charity. Skilfully directed by Gavin Stride and…
VILLAGE hall pantomime is a uniquely British rural art form. It has a few essential rules. You must know most of the people on stage. There must be some local jokes. Children from the village will come and dance and sing. The costumes will be colourful. Lots of things will go a little bit wrong,…
WHEN I worked at the Evening News in London, my friend Laine and I used to spend all our spare money on tickets for the National Theatre (at the Old Vic) and then we’d put out all our clothes on the beds in the flat we shared and perform our favourite plays, grabbing the costume…
BERLIN Cabaret came to Castle Cary last night in the form of singing duo Sasha Herriman and Tami Tal, aka The Bluebirds. The show, which is on a short tour, was co-promoted by Take Art, Somerset’s enterprising arts charity, and hard-working local promoters Judi and Oliver Morrison. With the Caryford Hall suitably transformed for the…
BACK in 1972, Shaftesbury Arts Centre performed a version of Edward Lear’s famous nonsense poem, adapted for the stage by Sheila Ruskin and David Wood. And in their audience were Sue and John Cadmore and their young son, who was delighted by the show. So when Sue was invited to direct this year’s “Christmas” show,…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra leader Amyn Merchant Andrew Litton: Conductor Alexei Volodin: Piano ELGAR: Cockaigne Overture RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No. 1 VAUGHN WILLIAMS: Symphony No. 2 “London” THE popular English pieces in this well-attended BSO concert form an obvious pairing. Both were inspired by London, and both are rooted in the expansive Edwardian era when the…
SOME of us spend our leisure time in the darkness of theatres, some of us on the terraces of the local football club. They are two different worlds, and they are brought comically, poignantly and brilliantly together in Wassail Theatre’s first play The Giants, which started a tour of the south west at the David…
THE cast of the Watermill Newbury touring production of Calamity Jane are so full of infectious energy that the audience clearly wanted to join in the hoe-down finale. The company that specialises in mounting shows in which the cast plays the music live on stage is at Bath Theatre Royal this week at the start…
I KNEW nothing about this play before I went to see it, apart from recognising the title, and was expecting a Ray Cooney style political farce, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was no farce, but a comic satire; a commentary on the dire state of politics in the early 21st Century….
MAGNIFICENT musical madcap mallarkey, maintaining momentum movingly, magically, melodramatically memorable, meaningfully, markedly mad miracle, is the sort of sentence that used to be greeted with oohs and aahs as Leonard Sachs, as Master of Ceremonies, introduced a variety act on the BBC programme The Good Old Days from the Leeds City Varieties, with seemingly endless…