THE original Pelléas Ensemble programme had to be amended at fairly short notice owing to the harpist, Oliver Wass, being indisposed with a broken thumb. The challenge was to find fellow musicians who were free for a three-day tour for Concerts in the West and who were able to put together a programme of music…
THE simmering, seething row about anti-semitism in the Labour party and the recent Novichok poisonings in Salisbury added to the intensity of PUSH, Howard Moody’s opera based on the true story of a Belgian Jew, Simon Gronowski, whose mother pushed him off a train to Auschwitz and thus saved his life. Anti-Jewish feelings and Cold…
IT was some coup when director Claudia Pepler got the rights to perform In the Heights, the first hiphop play by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, for her Frome summer school. And then it was quite a challenge to transform a group of Somerset acting teenagers into convincing Latinos in Washington Heights. The result was nothing…
THE 2018 Theatre Royal Bath summer school company is performing a witty and inventive adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair at the egg until Sunday 26th August. It really is a glittering all-singing, all-dancing production that cleverly uses all levels of the dedicated youth theatre space that is the egg, taking its audience on a whistle-stop…
ARTHUR Miller’s play The Price, written in 1968 at the end of what is regarded as his greatest period, draws from his own experiences of the Depression. Two brothers, both with great student promise, have gone different ways. One is a successful doctor, the other a policeman. It’s 16 years after the death of their…
THIS production is a first-class example a pre-packed sure fire hit, a triumph of the PR team’s art. DreamWorks, which owns the Shrek franchise, knows a good thing when they see one (with four films already released, and a fifth in the pipeline), since the initial showing in 2001, as well as TV series and …
WHAT do we need in a time of frightening uncertainty and incomprehensible world events? How about getting together with a few dozen strangers in a tent, joining hands and singing? Kneehigh’s prescription, Ubu Karaoke, is freely and brilliantly based on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, first seen in Paris in 1892 when it caused riots and…
PATRICIA Highsmith, the American writer who died in Switzerland in 1995, is best known for her Ripliad, five books in which the central character is the amoral and conscienceless Tom Ripley. A hiatus in her writing following the fourth book in 1980 predictably caused some consternation at her New York publishing house. From there, Australian…
DRAMATIC Productions are back at the Tivoli this Summer, with two plays, the Mike Leigh classic Abigail’s Party, and another play by the ever-prolific Alan Ayckbourn. Things We Do For Love is described by director Tracy Murray as “not done very often as the set is very complicated”, and when I looked it up online…
IT’S a confusing time to be a girl today. We are celebrating 100 years since the first women in the UK could vote, but our strong and powerful role models seem to be behaving in less than strong and powerful ways. We are taught we can do anything, dress how we like, but then we are…