BATH Gilbert & Sullivan Society pays tribute to a great British tradition in its spring show, an Old Time Music Hall, at the Mission Theatre from Wednesday 24th to Friday 26th April at 7.30pm, with a Saturday matinee at 2pm. Much-loved for their regular G&S productions, the multi-award winning Bath society has also staged popular…
ONE of Alan Ayckbourn’s most popular plays, A Chorus of Disapproval, comes to Salisbury Playhouse from 30th April to 18th May, with previews from 25th April. Directed by Gareth Machin, the artistic director of Wiltshire Creative, the large cast features Damian Humbley as the hapless central character, Guy, and Robert Bowman, seen last year in…
SALISBURY Cathedral has a week-long festival in May to mark the centenary of one of the major figures of late 19th and early 20th century English music, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. The festival, from Monday 6th to Sunday 12th May, will include concerts and music by Stanford within the cathedral services. Nowadays, Stanford is largely…
TIMES Radio presenter and political columnist Matt Chorley is looking forward to the general election and he wants to share his thoughts and expertise with audiences across the country, including the Marine Theatre at Lyme Regis, where he will perform his show, Poll Dancer, on Friday 26th April. Drawing on his own two decades of…
WE Brits really do love our murder mysteries, and now Salisbury’s Studio Theatre has found an ancient Agatha Christie that tells a rather different story, but with all the essential elements thrown in, all ready for a two-week sell-out staging. The provenance of Love from a Stranger is a bit of a mystery in itself,…
IN the mid 1990s, a survey of the most performed plays in the UK named John Godber as the third most popular playwright behind Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn. By comparison with the Bard of Avon, who still remains unchallenged at the head of affairs, and Alan Ayckbourn, although not quite as popular as he once…
IF there was such a term as “Grand Ballet”, you could use it to label The Sleeping Beauty. Every thing about it is on a grand scale – Tchaikovsky’s score, the second longest he composed for any genre, Marius Petipa’s original choreography, based in the Brothers Grimm’s interpretation of Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, even the original…
THE punchline of the old joke about the local yokels’ reply to a passing motorist asking for directions: “I wouldn’t start from here in the first place”, in some ways fits this adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story. The story takes us back and forth from late 19th century Pennsylvanian coal fields and the battle between…
MOST theatre lovers and pantomime fans have heard the name Grimaldi and can possibly conjure up an image of the legendary clown, but know very little about the man or his life. That all changes with Sue Curtis’s new play Slapstick, getting its world premier at this year’s Bath Comedy Festival. The play, written in…
“YESTERDAY upon the stairs I met a man who wasn’t there” – so starts William Hughes Mearns’ poem Antigonish. If you replace “woman” for “man”, you have a description of a very important contributor to this show who sadly from the audience point of view, appears only via video images rather then in person. The…