THE magic starts the moment you enter Yeovil Octagon’s wide auditorium for this season’s pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk. Helga Wood has transformed the stage into a veritable vegetable feast, just the thing for a story about beans and peas. And no opportunity for a dreadful (and hilarious) joke is left fallow in this terrific…
WHEN it comes to writing pantomime, Andrew Pollard and Kieran Buckeridge are something of a dream team. Andrew has now written fresh scripts for more than a dozen shows and played dame in most of them. The multi-talented Kieran composes the music, writes the lyrics (with Andrew) and plays dame too, all fitted in round…
HOW many miles to Babylon? The question begins a nursery rhyme first written down in 1801, but probably far older, and the whole rhyme forms part of the folklore tradition that underpins the novel Stardust, by Neil Gaiman, the film adaptation starring Claire Danes and Robert de Niro, and Russ Tunney’s enchanting stage adaptation for…
THE Christmas show at Frome’s Merlin Theatre has built up a reputation for multi media invention and quirky excellence over the years. And for the production of Chris Blackwood and Piers Chater Robinson’s musical version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, returning director Claudia Pepler has excelled herself. Massive puppet figures join atmospheric projections to enhance…
THERE’S something about the English and their dogs, and you couldn’t get more English than Mr and Mrs Dearly, human stars of the Tobacco Factory/Travelling Light production of 101 Dalmatians, on in Bristol until 11th January. Dodie Smith’s immortal story has been brilliantly adapted for this exciting, heart-warming family show, performed by five actors and…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra leader Amyn Merchant Kees Bakels: Conductor Ronald Brautigam: Piano BRITTEN: Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge MENDELSSOHN: Piano Concerto No. 1 MENDELSSOHN: Overture: Fingal’s Cave DEBUSSY: La Mer KEES Bakels, now approaching his 70th birthday, has been a regular and welcome guest conductor in Poole for many years….
THE versatile and talented Studio Theatre Company in Salisbury collects awards locally and nationally and produces a number of varied plays every year at its Ashley Road headquarters. They don’t do musicals and they don’t do pantomimes, so it’s no surprise at this time of year that no-one in the audience is required to shout…
FOR my ninth birthday, my godfather sent me a book and a letter saying “my goodness, it will be double figures next time!” (silly the things you remember). The book was Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. From the first sight of that distinctive cover with its pen and ink drawings and maps, I was…
MARKING its new collaboration with the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Nottingham, the Nuffield on the Southampton University campus commissioned award-winning television comedy scriptwriter Georgia Pritchett to adapt Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story The Snow Queen as a Christmas show with a different slant. And that she has done. The multi-talented eight-strong cast take the…
ONE day, more than ten years ago in Bristol, fledgling musician, singer and DJ Ed Patrick crawled into the Google underlay, found an anagram site, pressed a button … and out came Kid Carpet. Kid has been delighting children and their parents ever since, and his latest show, The Magic Elves, is playing at Bristol…