ANDREW Lloyd Weber, composer of, amongst others, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, Cats and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Julian Fellowes, author of Downton Abbey and Aristocrats, are hardly the first names that would come to mind if you were looking for a composer and someone to adopt the script of a cult…
TIM Firth’s play Sheila’s Island – a sort of gender-swapped version of his 1992 Neville’s Island – is touring the UK in a production by Joanna Read. When it opened at Bath Theatre Royal on 11th May, one of its four actors, Abigail Thaw, was indisposed, and the remarkable Tracy Collier got the chance to…
THERE are so many things to admire in the Leeds Playhouse’s production of CS Lewis’s classic children’s book, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Staging, lighting and sound teams combine to make it a visual treat, and the way in which the cast combine their skills as musicians, providing a continual stream of appropriate…
IT was good to see that BODS were not frightened to put their full name, Bath Operatic and Dramatic Society, at the head of the central page of their informative programme for Crazy for You. Some groups nowadays will bend over backwards to try and ensure that the audience does not realise that the production…
DORSET-born singer-songwriter, musician and poet PJ Harvey has visited Dorset Museum in Dorchester to present a hand-corrected proof of her dialect poem Orlam and a photograph showing her wearing traditional Dorset buttons. Accompanied by her mother Eva, she spent an afternoon at the museum, starting in the library. Here she presented the interim director Elizabeth…
LONG before the line ‘No Sir this is the West, when the legend becomes fact print the legend’, was spoken in John Ford’s 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, the Americans had begun the habit of glorifying dubious characters in their past history. Men like the multi-murderer William H Bonney, alias Billy the…
WHEN Mark Bell took on the challenge of directing The Play that Goes Wrong, he opted for out- and-out farce dominated by mimed comedy, and as was seen last week in Bath in the new reworking of his original production, it is a formula that works a treat. Faced with transferring a 1985 film version…
“SURPRISE, surprise” is the cry that in many a story goes up as our hero opens the door to find a room full of friends waiting to give them a surprise party. So far no one has thrown a surprise party for me, but under director Sean Turner’s clever reworking of Mark Bell’s original, this…
IT’s hard to believe that an early reviewer described Franz Lehar’s sparkling operetta The Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) as “distasteful.” To us, it is the epitome of Viennese music – tuneful, timeless, frivolous and the epitome of a careless era before the horrors which would break over Europe in the 20th century. There is…
POPULAR music tastes have always been a movable feast. Ragtime took over from Music Hall, and then was replaced by Jazz, which in turn lost out to Big Band and Swing, which reigned until Rock ‘n’ Roll arrived in the swinging sixties. The 1970s and 80s saw the rock bands kings of the genre, and…