THERE is something deeply satisfying about Andrew Carpenter’s production of The Producers at Frome’s Merlin Theatre. It works triumphantly against all the odds that are stacked against it. The show is the story of a wily Broadway producer, Max Bialystock, and a nervous accountant, Leo Bloom, who plot to put on a stinker of a…
IN August 2014 Her Majesty the Queen officially pardoned code breaker Alan Turing, wiping out his conviction for gross indecency. But of course it was 60 years too late. The brilliant cryptographer and founder of computer science, an old boy of Sherborne School and decoder of the German Enigma code, died in 1954 at the…
MISBEHAVIN’, the North Dorset-based jazz quartet, have released their second CD, launched at a gig at the Grosvenor Hotel in Shaftesbury to an enthusiastic audience in the Assembly Room. It is seven years since the first album – Some Other Time (you might conclude that these musicians have time on their minds!) and the new…
THOMAS Aikenhead was the last person in Britain sentenced to death for blasphemy, and the Edinburgh student went to his death in 1697 with the words: “It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth, and to seek for it as for hid treasure.” These chilling facts…
Mozart: Exultate Jubilate K165 Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem op. 45 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amin Merchant Bournemouth Symphony Chorus Simon Halsey conductor Sarah Tynan soprano David Soar baritone AS a choir trainer, Simon Halsey has in recent years carried all before him. Principal Conductor of Berlin Radio Choir from 2001 to 2015, he now leads…
TAUNTON Thespians’ production of Round and Round the Garden, one segment of Alan Ayckbourn’s ever-popular The Norman Conquests trilogy, is their fourth since their much-trumpeted return to the Brewhouse in November 2014, and the best of the four to date. With Ayckbourn you sometimes get the feeling that he starts by devising a technical challenge…
EVITA is one of the all-time great musicals – it has a strong (true) story, exciting music, memorable songs and two of the most demanding roles in music theatre. Yeovil Amateur Operatic Society does splendid justice to this Lloyd Webber-Rice masterpiece! It’s a cleverly constructed show, because you get both the icon of Argentina’s poverty-stricken…
DEBORAH Gearing’s new play UpBeat, on the road with Forest Forge until 9th April, should be compulsory viewing for anyone interested in climate change, and for how “alternative” lifestyles become the obvious option for those who care about their environment. It that all sounds a bit heavy, it’s not meant to, although this musical three-hander…
RICHARD Bean, creator of One Man Two Guv’nors, started his playwriting career with Toast, an imagined night shift at a Hull bread factory where he worked as a teenager. And a revival of the London production is currently touring the UK, at Bath Theatre Royal until 12th March. Bean was only 18 when he joined…
AS part of the current Artsreach season, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s contemporary music ensemble Kokoro (a Japanese word meaning “heart”) has been touring the south and south west with a series of exhilarating programmes. Friday night at the village hall at Burton Bradstock was no exception, featuring music by three 20th century greats – Stravinsky,…