FORTY years after its premiere in Scarborough, Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Disapproval, the play set in and around an amateur production of John Gay’s A Beggar’s Opera, returns to Salisbury Playhouse for a four week run. With its cast of 13, it’s a big undertaking and director Gareth Machin is keen to point out…
THE May screenings by Moviola around our region include Oscar-nominee The Holdovers and the period English comedy Wicked Little Letters, but two other films this month deserve a special mention – the acclaimed French drama Anatomy of a Fall, and the 2023 musical version of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, The Colour Purple. Anatomy of a…
FOLK quartet Dallahan’s founding member and frontman Jack Badcock releases his first solo album, Cosmography, early in May, and is heading out on a 16-venue UK tour to introduce his many fans to the new songs. He will be at Bridport’s British Legion Hall on Saturday 18th May, and at Ashburton Arts Centre two days…
A COCKTAIL of Thomas Mann’s semi-autographical novella Death in Venice, a Benjamin Britten score composed in the last months of his life, and the tumbling, mime and balancing skills of circus performers looks like a guaranteed mixture for a disastrous opera production. But if you add in the imaginative talents of director Olivia Fuchs, designer…
THE arts are being removed from school curriculums, grants for further studies are being axed, London theatres are constantly criticised for exorbitant ticket prices, pros are being precious over pronouns and diversity box-ticking is rampant. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the importance of amateur dramatics is ever more current, and that the brilliant Ian…
THERE are so many conspiracy theories about the composition of Cosi fan Tutte that they would make the basis of the plot for an opera in their own right. Was it the Emperor Joseph II, who died shortly after the first performance of the opera in 1790, who suggested the idea to Mozart, or since…
EVEN lifelong opera-lovers can sometimes feel dispirited. Opera survives on the support, generosity and love of a generation born within 20 years of the war – anyone looking around them in the stalls, or the grand tier, or the balcony or, frankly, even the amphitheatre of the Royal Opera House might be forgiven for wondering where…
PLAYWRIGHTS Ian Hislop and Nick Newman took the script that they part-wrote for the Hollywood film A Bunch of Amateurs, starring Burt Reynolds, and turned it into a stage play, which has been chosen as the spring production for Frome Drama Club, at the Merlin Theatre from 25th to 27th April. The two hugely talented…
THOSE of us of “a certain age” who remember Arthur Penn’s iconic 1967 film of Bonnie and Clyde, starring a never-better Warren Beatty and a brilliant Faye Dunaway, are bound to look forward to the award-winning musical version – coming to Bath Theatre Royal from 30th April to 4th May – with a mixture of…
NOEL Coward’s Still Life, better known as the stiff-lipped weepie Brief Encounter, focuses on genteel star-crossed lovers Alec and Laura, thrown together when she gets a sooty smut caught in her eye on a railway station. In the film, their love is a tragically doomed affair, but in this more nuanced adaptation by Dorchester Drama…