IF there was such a term as “Grand Ballet”, you could use it to label The Sleeping Beauty. Every thing about it is on a grand scale – Tchaikovsky’s score, the second longest he composed for any genre, Marius Petipa’s original choreography, based in the Brothers Grimm’s interpretation of Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, even the original…
THE punchline of the old joke about the local yokels’ reply to a passing motorist asking for directions: “I wouldn’t start from here in the first place”, in some ways fits this adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story. The story takes us back and forth from late 19th century Pennsylvanian coal fields and the battle between…
MOST theatre lovers and pantomime fans have heard the name Grimaldi and can possibly conjure up an image of the legendary clown, but know very little about the man or his life. That all changes with Sue Curtis’s new play Slapstick, getting its world premier at this year’s Bath Comedy Festival. The play, written in…
“YESTERDAY upon the stairs I met a man who wasn’t there” – so starts William Hughes Mearns’ poem Antigonish. If you replace “woman” for “man”, you have a description of a very important contributor to this show who sadly from the audience point of view, appears only via video images rather then in person. The…
THE first performance of Shaftesbury Arts Centre’s remarkable production of Amanda Whittington’s The Thrill of Love co-incided with the exact moment of the 69th anniversary of Ruth Ellis’s shooting of her abusive lover David Blakely, which famously led to the last execution of a woman in Britain. The forensic play, with its cast of four…
HAROLD Pinter almost single-handedly invented the “theatre of menace”, and his successors took up the idea and ran with it. Watching his early 1960s television play The Lover again, in the brilliant production by Lindsay Posner currently on stage at the intimate Ustinov Studio in Bath, I couldn’t help but feel that he had invented…
IT’S 34 years since the fledgling Milborne Port Opera took to the village hall stage to perform Trial by Jury, and since then dozens of singing actors, acting singers and dancers have got together around Easter to put on a show. The company’s reputation has grown, the repertoire become more varied, and, from the original…
AFTER singing Climb Every Mountain at a band call in the Circle Bar of Bristol Hippodrome, a friend of mine fixed a steely eye on the conductor and brass section of the orchestra and said, “Listen gentleman, the audience will have paid their money to hear me sing this number, not hear you play it”….
IN many ways the story of Montague Burton, gentlemen’s outfitters, runs parallel with the rise and fall of the steel industry in the UK. Escaping from Russian pogroms, Lithuanian born Meshe David Osinsky arrived in this country in 1900, aged 15 and unable to speak English. Within a year he was earning a living as…
AT 9pm on Wednesday July 20th 2011 BBC three put out a documentary directed and produced by Jenny Popplewell entitled Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, which to put it mildly raised more than a few eyebrows. Narrated by Jill Halfpenny it followed the story of County Durham schoolboy Jamie Campbell, who after coming out as…