MEL Brooks’ musical version of his cult film The Producers takes no prisoners, and those easily offended should certainly steer clear. And SMTC, under their director Lois Harbison, do the show proud, pulling no punches as they expose the underbelly of theatrical production to the scrutiny of the audience. Briefly the story is of Max…
WELL, here’s a difficult question. Should Tom Conti’s production of the Somerset Maugham/ Rodney Ackland play Before the Party, in which Conti also stars, be treated as a post-modern skit on the creaking amateur productions of legend, or taken seriously as a professional production of a biting but witty social drama? Judging by the response…
THE autumn season at Bath Theatre Royal’s Ustinov Studio opens with flourish, as Eugene Marin Labiche’s farce Monsieur Popular weaves its deceitful magic on a newly-framed stage until 7th November. The new translation by Jeremy Sams is full of wit and guile as it unfolds the comical story of a “confirmed bachelor” who takes the…
THE main question on my mind this evening was “why”? Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a fairly good Steve Martin and Michael Caine 1988 film about a couple of con men trying to outdo each other on the French Riviera, which itself was based on an earlier comedy, Bedtime Story, starring David Niven as the suave…
YEOVIL Amateur Operatic Society was hot off the mark when it first staged Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe in 1903, less than 20 years after the work’s London premiere. The Somerset society was started a year earlier, and its first seven shows were by G and S. This week YAOS’s sixth production of the batty story…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Lise Lindstrom (soprano) WHAT a way to start another season! At a packed Lighthouse, the BSO gave an intense yet disciplined semi-staged performance of the scandalous and ground-breaking 1905 opera by Richard Strauss, backed by a world-class team of fifteen soloists. The story of Salome, based…
GEORGE Orwell’s terrifying and prophetic dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949, has been adapted and re-imagined by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, and it is playing at Bath’s Theatre Royal until 3rd October, before heading to Australia and the USA. The award-winning production, by Headlong, Nottingham Playhouse and the Almeida, opened two years ago. The…
THE first series of Music at St Giles House at Wimborne St Giles comes to a close on Tuesday 29th September with a visit from the Soloists of Prussia Cove. The programme of music, organised in collaboration between Lord Shaftesbury and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, has been a great success, and plans for the 2016…
SUNSET Boulevard, based as it is on the Billy Wilder film of the same name, depends on the casting of a rock solid, completely confident and fully capable singer and actor in the role of Norma Desmond, the aging silent film star who hopes for one final revival, despite the coming of the talkies. Maureen…
ALAN Bennett, now recognised as a National Treasure, regards himself as an unlikely candidate for the position. A shy but brilliant boy in his Leeds school, he went on to Oxford, graduating and teaching ancient history, before meeting up with Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and introducing a new brand of satire to…