AMONGST my most treasured long-playing records is a box containing two LPs of the January 1954 BBC Third Programme broadcast of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood originally described as a play for voices. Some 30 actors, led by Richard Burton and Richard Bebb as the narrators, combined to bring the 60+ named characters who inhabited…
DIRECTOR Robert Wiene’s 1920 horror film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is considered to be the masterpiece of German expressionist filmmaking. With sharp angles, crooked windows, twisted streets with leaning buildings, its unique visual pictures present the story from angles that are anything but the expected manner of the usual film and theatrical presentation of…
THE play of Steel Magnolias starts with gunshots ringing round the auditorium. It’s an American man – father of Shelby the bride – demonstrating his right to bear, and discharge, arms, this time at the birds in the fruit trees and the magnificent old oaks surrounding his Louisiana property, so they don’t mess up the…
RICHARD Thompson was 18 years old when he and Simon Nicol, Ashley Hutchings and Shaun Frater formed Fairport Convention in 1967, “inventing” – as he told the Poole Lighthouse audience – a new musical genre. Now he is 77, and still going very strong, as is the band he left in 1971, with the seminal…
LATE in life, the by then sadly neglected composer and arranger Max Steiner, was asked by an interviewer what he thought of modern film scores. Steiner, arguably the most prolific, most famous and best composer of more than 300 film scores, including Gone with the Wind and King Kong, replied: “I never comment on things…
IT is often a bit of a mystery to English audiences holding back the tears from performances of Three Sisters or Uncle Vanya to be told that Chekhov plays were intended as comedies. Even an attempt to perform The Cherry Orchard as broad comedy can come over as uncomfortably clunky. Back in 1973 Neil Simon…
ANTHONY Jay and Jonathan Lynn are immortalised in the television Hall of Fame as creators of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, which together ran for 37 episodes between 1980 and 1988. Jonathan Lynn took up the parliamentary quill again in 2023 for a “last hurrah” originally entitled I’m Sorry, Prime Minister, I Can’t Quite Remember,” and…
THE problem with reviewing a wholly-new interpretation of a very familiar play is comparison – what would a new audience make of a play you know, and they don’t? So it is with the extraordinarily versatile and inventive Tracy-Ann Oberman’s version of Noel Coward’s 1939 play Present Laughter, opening at Bath before an eight-venue UK tour….
THE history of theatre, film and TV is strewn with adaptations of famous works that have proved disastrous rather than successful. When in 2000 director/choreographer Matthew Bourne decided to marry the music of one of the world’s most popular operas, Bizet’s Carmen, with James M Cain’s novel and 1945 film noir The Postman Only Rings…
THIS juke box musical, based on the music of Queen, has one great fundamental problem to overcome – the fact that Freddy Mercury sang the vast majority of the numbers recorded or sung live on stage by the band. With his four-octave range, Mercury created a distinctive sound that is almost impossible to copy. Ben…