Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra leader Amyn Merchant Andrew Litton: Conductor Alexei Volodin: Piano ELGAR: Cockaigne Overture RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No. 1 VAUGHN WILLIAMS: Symphony No. 2 “London” THE popular English pieces in this well-attended BSO concert form an obvious pairing. Both were inspired by London, and both are rooted in the expansive Edwardian era when the…
SOME of us spend our leisure time in the darkness of theatres, some of us on the terraces of the local football club. They are two different worlds, and they are brought comically, poignantly and brilliantly together in Wassail Theatre’s first play The Giants, which started a tour of the south west at the David…
THE cast of the Watermill Newbury touring production of Calamity Jane are so full of infectious energy that the audience clearly wanted to join in the hoe-down finale. The company that specialises in mounting shows in which the cast plays the music live on stage is at Bath Theatre Royal this week at the start…
I KNEW nothing about this play before I went to see it, apart from recognising the title, and was expecting a Ray Cooney style political farce, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was no farce, but a comic satire; a commentary on the dire state of politics in the early 21st Century….
MAGNIFICENT musical madcap mallarkey, maintaining momentum movingly, magically, melodramatically memorable, meaningfully, markedly mad miracle, is the sort of sentence that used to be greeted with oohs and aahs as Leonard Sachs, as Master of Ceremonies, introduced a variety act on the BBC programme The Good Old Days from the Leeds City Varieties, with seemingly endless…
THERE were some who thought that a theatrical adaptation of Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, with its tense courtroom climax, would be unlikely to work in the sylvan setting of Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, but last summer’s production confounded the sceptics, winning rave reviews from critics and the sell-out audiences. When…
THERE’S a standing joke in our family that I ought to be awarded a Damehood, for services to pantomime. That’s because, for as long as I can remember (or at least since I last wrote a pantomime myself) I have been traipsing round the region reviewing professional pantos before Christmas, and amateur ones after. My…
TAKE more than forty songs, all linked to travel; methods, destinations, weather, emotions and feelings associated with it, four sublimely talented actor-musicians, the cream of Salisbury Playhouse’s creative team, including its Artistic Director and one of the performers, and the intimate ambience of the Salberg Studio, and I challenge anybody not to be delighted with…
A GROUP of itinerant players, each with a musical instrument, surrounded by raggedy children, turns up amid the Christmas crowd, and just a few notes on the fiddle captures their attention. The children whirl and dance, their parents play and clap and before long everyone is woven into the show. The magic of the Klezmer…
THREE very funny men are at the centre of the pantomime at Bath this Christmas, and when they are on stage the magic is tangible. It’s something you look for as much in the faces and voices of the children in the audience as on the stage, and there isn’t a more magical venue than…