HANDEL in Italy was the final concert in this year’s Bath Bachfest, the successor to the city’s famous Bach Festival, and organised under the aegis of its long established Mozartfest. There were five concerts in this year’s series, featuring music not just by J.S. Bach but from the wider baroque period – Corelli, Vivaldi, Telemann,…
CARY Amateur Theatrical Society’s latest production is Lionel Bart’s ever-popular musical Oliver! Based, of course, on the novel by Charles Dickens, the show was the first modern British musical to have transferred successfully to Broadway. Although well over 50 years old now, there can be little doubt that, as a stage show, it has stood…
FOUR nights of music from Three Women and the Truth is half way through, Mary Gauthier, Eliza Gilkyson and Gretchen Peters, whose combined acronymic name came as a shock when they realised it, but has now been “owned’ by the trio, are playing to packed and very varied houses in California this week. They started…
SOMETHING wicked this way comes, and stays at Bristol Hippodrome for the next four weeks. This musical about two friends in the land of Oz, Glinda and Elphaba, and how one may be good and one may be wicked, has charmed audiences on Broadway and in London’s West End for the past twelve and nine…
GREAT Ormond Street Hospital was famously left the rights to Peter Pan by J M Barrie, and even if the actual copyright may have lapsed, most versions of this story still honour this, and there is a whole page dedicated to GOSH in the second (and fairly normal) half of the programme for Mischief Theatre’s…
THE historic State Theatre in Auburn, California is one of those art deco cinemas we don’t have in the UK, resplendent with its original “marquee” –the colourful neon frontispiece (pictured) and it is now the headquarters of the city”s burgeoning arts association. It has recently had a refit, the central wall inserted to create a…
STURMINSTER Newton Amateur Dramatic Society’s annual pantomime Sleeping Beauty was everything a community panto should be. It was slick, the songs were well chosen, well sung and (above all) nice and short, there was some clever choreography and, with a talented company of about two dozen performers covering the whole age range, there were opportunities…
SINCE I often feel like a dinosaur, I don’t mind confessing that I remember when Fanny Hill was eventually published in 1970 and what a deliciously wicked thrill it was to read it. After DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the truly shocking Last Exit To Brooklyn, it was the most explicit book most of…
JUST as the media is abuzz with questions like “are you brainy enough to see a Stoppard play,” Blanche McIntyre’s new production of one of his greatest – Arcadia – comes to Bath’s Theatre Royal. I find it rather depressing that the country is being asked to criticise Stoppard for writing work that is a…
JAMES Roose-Evans’ international hit play 84 Charing Cross Road started its life at Salisbury Playhouse in 1981, before a triumphant transfer to the West End (and then to Broadway) and an award-winning film. Now it’s back on stage in Salisbury, again directed by Roose-Evans– and it’s a sheer delight. I must be one of the…