THERE’S no Business like Show Business … so goes the lyric of Irving Berlin’s song from Annie Get Your Gun, and there is nothing better than good comic business to lift even a modestly written farcical comedy into an evening of riotous fun. Although this play may be described as a spoof of a murder…

IF you describe opera as being a story set to music which has virtually no spoken word, then this rap-style, sung through musical is an opera. Such a description would not be welcomed with open arms by the producers, because, whereas modern and classical ballet have, to the benefit of each, embraced each other, classical…

On 2oth May the promoters of the national tour of Bonnie and Clyde announced its cancellation with immediate effect, due to poor advance ticket sales.   THE musical version of the story of Bonnie and Clyde, with its Frank Wildhorn music, Don Black lyrics and Ivan Mencell book, started life in San Diego in 2009,…

FORTY years after its premiere in Scarborough, Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Disapproval, the play set in and around an amateur production of John Gay’s A Beggar’s Opera, returns to Salisbury Playhouse for a four week run. With its cast of 13, it’s a big undertaking and director Gareth Machin is keen to point out…

A COCKTAIL of Thomas Mann’s semi-autographical novella Death in Venice, a Benjamin Britten score composed in the last months of his life, and the tumbling, mime and balancing skills of circus performers looks like a guaranteed mixture for a disastrous opera production. But if you add in the imaginative talents of director Olivia Fuchs, designer…

THE arts are being removed from school curriculums, grants for further studies are being axed, London theatres are constantly criticised for exorbitant ticket prices, pros are being precious over pronouns and diversity box-ticking is rampant. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the importance of amateur dramatics is ever more current, and that the brilliant Ian…

THERE are so many conspiracy theories about the composition of Cosi fan Tutte that they would make the basis of the plot for an opera in their own right. Was it the Emperor Joseph II, who died shortly after the first performance of the opera in 1790, who suggested the idea to Mozart, or since…

EVEN lifelong opera-lovers can sometimes feel dispirited. Opera survives on the support, generosity and love of a generation born within 20 years of the war – anyone looking around them in the stalls, or the grand tier, or the balcony or, frankly, even the amphitheatre of the Royal Opera House might be forgiven for wondering where…

NOEL Coward’s Still Life, better known as the stiff-lipped weepie Brief Encounter, focuses on genteel star-crossed lovers Alec and Laura, thrown together when she gets a sooty smut caught in her eye on a railway station. In the film, their love is a tragically doomed affair, but in this more nuanced adaptation by Dorchester Drama…

WE Brits really do love our murder mysteries, and now Salisbury’s Studio Theatre has found an ancient Agatha Christie that tells a rather different story, but with all the essential elements thrown in, all ready for a two-week sell-out staging. The provenance of Love from a Stranger is a bit of a mystery in itself,…