YOU know what they say – if you remember the 60s, you weren’t really there. It is probably also true that if you remember the 50s, you wouldn’t want to go back there. But romantic Judy and her husband Johnny love the 50s. They love the music, the clothes, the home decor … Johnny obviously…
THE north east of England has for many years (centuries, if you include the Border Ballads) been a hotbed of folk music – home to the Waterson-Carthy dynasty, Fay Hield, Kathryn Tickell, The Unthanks, Lindisfarne … The list also includes Rachael McShane, an original member of folk big band Bellowhead, who travelled from Newcastle on…
SHAKESPEARE in the open air is a summer tradition, and this year the memory of sitting in the rain and cold seems like a thing of the past. It was a welcome relief as the cooling breeze wafted across the front of Muchelney’s ancient abbey, following the adventures of storm-separated identical twins Viola and Sebastian….
THE multi-talented actor, artist, playwright and adaptor Clive Francis has turned his pen to Graham Green’s comic novel Our Man in Havana to create a fast and furious visit to the Caribbean where the world’s most unlikely spy is recruited to help the British intelligence service in the time following the second world war and…
THERE is nothing funny about Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, the one about a boy who blinds horses, but there was a joke going around when it first opened on Broadway – that the British audiences thought it was a play about cruelty to horses, while the American audiences thought it was about cruelty to psychiatrists….
THE Rocky Horror Show, Blood Brothers and Salad Days have two things in common – they all had modest beginnings, before going on to enormous success. Rocky Horror began in the 60-seater Royal Court Theatre, Upstairs. Willy Russell’s play Blood Brothers, re-written as a musical, only met with modest success in Liverpool’s Playhouse. Salad Days,…
THE Four Seasons rock band was formed in 1960 when two members of the novelty act The Four Lovers, singer Frankie Valli and guitarist Tommy DeVito, were joined by bass player Nick Massi and composer and keyboard player Bob Gaudio. With changing personal, but always with the strong high falsetto voice of Frankie Valli as…
FOR those of us of a certain age, it seems incredible that the television series Fawlty Towers had only 12 half-hour episodes when it was first shown in 1975 … more than 50 years ago. Its set-piece scenes and catch phrases – and of course Sybil’s laugh – fast entered the Comedy Hall of Fame,…
POLLY Lamb’s latest play, Your Move, was sold out before it opened at the Town Hall, playing for the first three days of Frome Festival 2026. Once again, town councillor and fair housing advocate Lamb has created a play that taps into the concerns of the 2020s, focussing on the “new” ways we live and the…
NOEL Coward’s dazzling wit and uncompromising insights into human behaviour rightly won him the title of “The Master”, and his legacy is a collection of brilliant plays set in a time before political correctness and the “classless” society we now claim. That means they need a very careful and specific style to ring true and…