THERE’S a talking, walking, scheming feline in Street until 4th January, and he and his chums are delighting audiences at Strode Theatre. Glastonbury and Street Musical Comedy Society is back on the Strode stage for the fourth Christmas season, this year with Keith Marsden and Geoffrey Rundle’s version of Puss in Boots, directed by Rodney…

SALISBURY’S Salberg Studio has a Christmas hit on its hands with this year’s alternative show. The venue has built up a reputation for its cabaret-style shows, which in recent years have focussed on various songbooks. But perhaps the format had run its course, and Playhouse artistic director Gareth Machin and MD Kate Edgar put their…

IF what you want from your Christmas live entertainment is laughter, colour and SPECTACLE you can’t beat Robinson Crusoe and the Caribbean Pirates at the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton until 12th January. The bones of the traditional story are here – Robinson, Man Friday, pirates, etc – but this version (by Brian Conley and Michael…

ANNE of Green Gables is one of those stories that many people remember from their youth, in my case from a Sunday evening BBC dramatisation in the 1970s watched by all the family in the days when we only had three channels, and the story itself fosters the same sort of nostalgia in audiences when…

YEOVIL Octagon has its best pantomime ever this year, as Snow White bites her poisoned apple, the Magnificent Seven dwarfs dig their diamonds and the region’s finest dame Steve Bennett proves himself to be an arch improviser and master of comic timing. This is the second Evolution pantomime at the Octagon, which now, with the…

JM BARRIE’S story of Peter Pan, the boy who refuses to grow up, has a timeless and enduring appeal – perhaps not surprising when we have a Prime Minister who can’t resist saying he likes a glamorous TV cook in the middle of a trial when she’s a witness or taking a photograph of himself…

BATH’S show for very small children and their families this Christmas is Tove Jansson’s Moominland Midwinter, adapted for the egg stage by Hattie Naylor for Horse and Bamboo. The theatre company has built up a reputation for its delightful and beautifully told stories, using puppets and multi-media. At the egg, until Sunday 12th January, on…

MOST of us come to Hoffman’s story of The Nutcracker via the ballet and spectacular productions replete with Tchaikovsky’s music, sugar plum fairies and Christmas trees that start from a dot centre stage and rise to fill the space to the very top. But it’s a darker and more magical story that Hattie Naylor and…

THE rumbling voice of Giant Blunderbore, with its chorus of Fe Fi Fo Fum, fills the auditorium of Poole’s Lighthouse for the annual pantomime, this year a wonderfully traditional version of Jack and the Beanstalk, with enough new and modern touches to keep audiences of all ages on their toes. Judging by the response of…

THE West Gallery church music that Thomas Hardy knew and loved was brought to vivid life again last week in two picturesque West Dorset churches in concerts organised by Artsreach, Dorset’s rural arts organisation. The West Gallery concerts at Winterbourne Abbas and Abbotsbury churches, were part of Rooting Around the Ridgeway, a South Dorset Ridgeway…