THERE are just a handful of musicals which, like great actors, dominate the stage the moment they appear, standing head and shoulders above the rest of the herd. My Fair Lady, along with Oklahoma and Show Boat, is such a musical. No one-hit-wonder this show, a big success when first produced, but rarely seen afterwards….
DOUGIE Scarfe, chief executive of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, will have been with the Poole-based regional orchestra for ten years this year – and the celebrations began in style when he was named Orchestra Manager of the Year at the ABO/Classical Music Awards in Leeds. This prestigious award recognises his work in championing inclusion and…
WHEN a stage play is rapidly turned into a wildly successful movie, it is very hard for the average audience to rid its memory of the images of the starry leading actors. So it is with Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, immortalised in 1990 on film by Dolly Parton, Olympia Dukakis, Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Shirley…
ALAN Ayckbourn is as popular as he is prolific, so it’s no great surprise, as a reviewer, to see two of his plays in quick succession. An interesting contrast, though, as the productions (both excellent) are his first big success Relatively Speaking, which was at Bath, and How The Other Half Loves, at Salisbury Playhouse,…
THE members of Salisbury’s Studio Youth Theatre chose Russ Tunney’s highly-praised adaptation of Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (the first of her long series of Wolves books) for the first show of 2023, on at the theatre in Ashley Road until Saturday 18th February. Set in a time that never was – the…
Akimenko Nocturne Glazunov From the Middle Ages: Prelude Tanayev St John of Damascus Shostakovich Symphony No 4 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Bournemouth Symphony Chorus Kiril Karabits: Conductor LAST month the BSO announced that Kiril Karabits would be ending his tenure as chief conductor in the summer of 2024 after 15 years. Karabits’s…
THE current touring production of Phil Porter’s adaptation of The Lavender Hill Mob started its national progress last October and ends next weekend in Cornwall. Directed by Jeremy Sams, it stars Miles Jupp and Justin Edwards with a further six multi-role-playing actors to bring to life this stage version of the classic 1951 Ealing comedy,…
RUSSIA’s national poet, the creator of one of the world’s most famous and tragic love stories, Aleksandr Pushkin, is the subject of the latest talk by Graham Fawcett at Sladers Yard arts centre, West Bay, on Thursday 9th February at 7.30pm. Pushkin is revered in the West via the Russian composer Tchaikovsky as the creator…
THE current tour of the Conor McPherson play Girl from the North Country, set in Depression-era Duluth, Minnesota, at the bottom western corner of Lake Superior with songs by the city’s most famous son, Bob Dylan, returns to the south west at Bristol Hippodrome until 4th February. It’s an unforgettable piece of theatre, combining the…
WHEN five cleaning ladies, dressed in late 18th century clothes, but with modern boots instead of delicate slippers on their feet, took over the stage with the house lights still up, and informed the audience that they were going to tell them the tale of Pride and Prejudice from their point of view, you could…