THIS year is the 20th anniversary of Dorset Opera’s move from Sherborne’s Big Schoolroom to the Coade Hall at Bryanston School near Blandford, and something special was needed to celebrate the occasion. Artistic director Rod Kennedy could hardly have anticipated the extraordinary thrill that South Korean baritone Hansung Yoo would bring to Dorset in the…

SOME psychologists will tell you that early teens is the worst time for major life crises, like divorce or death, and one thing you learn in life is that nobody, absolutely nobody, can tell you how to grieve. It is something you have to find out for yourself. Bright-but-stroppy Rory is 15, and suddenly faced with…

WHAT is the summer open air theatre touring schedule without its Shakespeare, and no Shakespearean play is more popular than A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Revolving around love, mystery, demanding parents, jealous spouses, authoritarian rulers and blundering rustics, and with a beautiful forest setting, it tells a timeless story. Taunton Thespians began their summer tours back…

NEVER out of print since it was first published in 1865, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the best known stories ever written. Although thought of, and usually described as, a children’s novel, full of symbolism and surreal twists and turns, it has also found itself dissected and interpreted in literally hundreds…

THERE is an understandable degree of secrecy surrounding the meetings of The Susan B Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein, and, as the audience at Strode Theatre in Street is invited to attend the annual celebration, that sense of mystery must prevail. The year is 1956 and the Sisterhood meets in upper New…

I HAVE been struggling to find superlatives that adequately describe Frome’s Merlin Theatre production of Come From Away, on stage until Saturday 19th July. It is breathtakingly marvellous, powerful, poignant and astonishingly skillfully and soulfully done by both the 12-strong cast and the musicians in the ten-piece band. We will never forget the worldwide impact of…

SINGER-actor, chairman of the company, set mover … first-time director – John Clark certainly took on a lot of roles for Bath Opera’s summer tour of Verdi’s La Traviata. An experienced director of plays and musicals and regular performer, John has this year also tackled the challenge of directing one of the best-loved of all…

I MUST have seen Michael Frayn’s enduringly hilarious play Noises Off more than a dozen times during my reviewing life, with TV stars, leading West End actors, the Number 3 touring professional companies that it sends up, and by amateurs. I have never seen a production so wonderfully inventive and brilliantly performed as that by…

RODGERS and Hammerstein’s last musical together, The Sound of Music, was first performed only 14 years after the end of the Second World War, when memories of Nazi incursions over Europe were fresh in the minds of audiences. Now, the details of that war are unfamiliar to younger viewers, but, thanks to the powerful story…

THE first performances of David Hare’s new play Grace Pervades offer a unique opportunity to theatre lovers – to sit in one of the country’s most beautiful theatres learning fascinating facts about Victorian theatre legends Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, from a stage on which they actually performed. And, for these days of breathless star-struckery,…