FROM information overload in the rehearsal room to swashbuckling villainy on stage, Bath Theatre Royal’s 2025 pantomime team are hard at work, preparing for the big opening next week, still learning lines, routines, dance steps, songs and music … ‘You have information coming at you from every angle,” says Bath favourite, script-writer and comedian Jon…
AFTER what seems like centuries of watching and reviewing pantomimes, it is always a great thrill to spot a superstar performance on a local stage, and wait until the national critics and award-giving organisations put that name in their best-of-the-year lists. Salisbury Playhouse’s inventive, colourful, energetic and 100% fun version of Jack and the Beanstalk…
THERE is rich magic running through the Brewhouse Christmas show this year, and it seems to emanate from the mysterious rhynes and mumps around the county town, which can be surrounded in fast-rising water almost without warning, turning it into a different land. Sound a bit “woo-woo”? – well, maybe. Writer and director Sasha Wilson…
OLIVER Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy She Stoops to Conquer is said to have been based on an incident in his childhood, in which he was jestingly directed to a local manor house which he was told was an inn. Whatever the truth of the attribution, it resulted in a classic play that has stood the test…
CABARET should always have a frisson of wanton wit, a hint of burlesque, some risqué songs … and even a pinch of decadence. In the capable hands of Charlie Bicknell and Louise Innes it also has balls or claws – or Claus, if you will. The always in-demand duo has one more date before Christmas,…
IF you love folk and traditional music with a festive flavour, you probably already know that Christmas and the Mellstock Band go together like turkey and cranberry sauce. This December, the delightful quartet, who recreate the music of Thomas Hardy’s time, come to Bridport Arts Centre on Saturday 13th December at 7.30pm. The name Mellstock…
THERE’S nothing quite like raising your voice in Christmas song, and who better to do it with than the Celebrate Voice youth choir and the singing stars of the popular annual event. This year’s Celebrate Voice at Christmas, at Salisbury’s atmospheric Medieval Hall in the Cathedral Close, will be performed from Thursday 11th to Saturday…
TELEVISION schedules are packed with so-called “holiday” favourites (often films that didn’t get rave reviews first time out), and theatres are bursting at the seams with Dames, ugly sisters and winsome princesses, but Moviola’s audiences have different ideas, and the mobile cinema organisation’s December programme has a fascinating selection, led by the bittersweet Ballad of…
ONE of the most eagerly anticipated local concerts in the run-up to Christmas is always the male choral ensemble Opus Anglicanum’s Medieval Carols and Figgy Pudding, this year at Wells Cathedral on Tuesday 16th December and St Mary’s Church, Dorchester on Thursday 18th. For more than 30 years, the ensemble has performed this programme, which…
FRESH from his adventures in the Celebrity Traitors’ Scottish castle, historian David Olusoga comes to Bridport Electric Palace on Friday 12th December at 7.30pm, with a new talk, History’s Missing Chapters, in which he explores how and why some people and some events are remembered and others are forgotten. The acclaimed author, broadcaster and newspaper…