MYRA McDadd was already a fan of Stephen Sondheim when she and David Grierson saw an Edinburgh Fringe production of Sweeney Todd in 1995. “I realised that I was totally smitten by this show, with all its dark and dangerous themes,” she writes in her director’s notes to the programme for Shaftesbury Arts Centre’s autumn…
THE first time the British theatregoing public saw Arthur Miller’s timeless play The Crucible was at Bristol Old Vic, and now, to mark the 100th anniversary of the playwright’s birth, it is re-staged where it all started. Director Tom Morris says in the programme that the danger of staging the play is that we might…
BOURNEMOUTH’s Arts By The Sea festival is always rich with new work, exploratory, experimental, avant-garde, sometimes just plain wacky! It is ambitious and surprising and if you don’t like some things, you will also find others that will interest and excite you. One of this year’s new works was Freedom, Bread and Peace, a music-theatre…
MEL Brooks’ musical version of his cult film The Producers takes no prisoners, and those easily offended should certainly steer clear. And SMTC, under their director Lois Harbison, do the show proud, pulling no punches as they expose the underbelly of theatrical production to the scrutiny of the audience. Briefly the story is of Max…
WELL, here’s a difficult question. Should Tom Conti’s production of the Somerset Maugham/ Rodney Ackland play Before the Party, in which Conti also stars, be treated as a post-modern skit on the creaking amateur productions of legend, or taken seriously as a professional production of a biting but witty social drama? Judging by the response…
THE autumn season at Bath Theatre Royal’s Ustinov Studio opens with flourish, as Eugene Marin Labiche’s farce Monsieur Popular weaves its deceitful magic on a newly-framed stage until 7th November. The new translation by Jeremy Sams is full of wit and guile as it unfolds the comical story of a “confirmed bachelor” who takes the…
THE main question on my mind this evening was “why”? Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a fairly good Steve Martin and Michael Caine 1988 film about a couple of con men trying to outdo each other on the French Riviera, which itself was based on an earlier comedy, Bedtime Story, starring David Niven as the suave…
YEOVIL Amateur Operatic Society was hot off the mark when it first staged Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe in 1903, less than 20 years after the work’s London premiere. The Somerset society was started a year earlier, and its first seven shows were by G and S. This week YAOS’s sixth production of the batty story…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Lise Lindstrom (soprano) WHAT a way to start another season! At a packed Lighthouse, the BSO gave an intense yet disciplined semi-staged performance of the scandalous and ground-breaking 1905 opera by Richard Strauss, backed by a world-class team of fifteen soloists. The story of Salome, based…
GEORGE Orwell’s terrifying and prophetic dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949, has been adapted and re-imagined by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, and it is playing at Bath’s Theatre Royal until 3rd October, before heading to Australia and the USA. The award-winning production, by Headlong, Nottingham Playhouse and the Almeida, opened two years ago. The…