SALISBURY Playhouse’s latest big show is a co-production with Colchester Mercury Theatre of Howard Ashman’s and Alan Menken’s ever popular musical Little Shop of Horrors. As the author himself writes, the show satirizes many things: science fiction, B movies, musical comedy and even the Faust legend. There is, therefore, a real temptation to play it…
AS part of the Shaftesbury Chamber Music Series’ sixth season, founder and series director Ruth Rogers (violin) was joined yesterday afternoon by Katharine Gowers (violin), Adrian Brendel (cello) and Charles Owen (piano). Together these musicians form the Plush Ensemble. The Series always promises to present musicians of the highest calibre and all four come with…
HAVING only seen the original 1968 Mel Brooks film of The Producers, in which the only piece of featured original music is the title of the show within the show, Springtime For Hitler, I was intrigued to see how this film had been turned into a full scale stage musical, in the same way as…
DAISY Meredith has won the first scholarship to Grangewood School for Girls, the very first elementary schoolgirl to do so, and this does not go down well with some of the other girls. Denise Deegan’s witty pastiche on the books of Angela Brazil started life at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton in 1983, before a…
THERE are few times when anyone can say they have seen two definitive productions of famous musicals within 19 days, but I am fortunate enough to have done so, and both of them thanks to people who live in Somerset. The first was the recent ground-breaking and site-specific Sweeney Todd, set in a rebuilt pie shop…
BATH audiences were delighted last night to have had the opportunity of seeing father and son James and Jack Fox in a brand new stage adaptation of Dear Lupin. The book on which it is based, Dear Lupin: Letters to a Wayward Son, was written by father and son Roger and Charlie Mortimer in 2012…
THE second offering in this year’s Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory season is Sheridan’s classic comedy The School for Scandal. Dominic Power has not only adapted the text but added a prologue and epilogue that underline the play’s contemporary relevance. It opens in a salon of gossip, so how much more appropriate could it be…
ARTHUR Miller’s play Death of a Salesman is regarded by many as the finest American play of the 20th century, and its central character Willy Loman as the greatest character in American theatre. Gregory Doran’s new production, on the main stage at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (and transferring to the West End), underlines…
BASED on one of Agatha Christie’s most famous and enduring novels, published in 1939, this play was originally called Ten Little Niggers. By the time novel and play reached America the title had become Ten Little Indians, and at some point even this proved offensive to some, so the title was changed to the last…
ARTHUR Miller’s play The Crucible, written 62 years ago as a response to the anti-Communist McCarthy Witch Hunts, is as relevant and powerful today as it was then. When director Peter Kelly chose it for the Studio Theatre’s April play, and rehearsals began, he saw a news clip of terrorists demanding that hostages recite sacred…