IF the spirit of Noel Coward hovers around any theatre where his plays are being staged, it must have been very blithe last week, when Dramatic Productions staged his delightful satire on the vogue for seances and spiritualism in the appropriately Art Deco setting of Wimborne’s Tivoli Theatre. Blithe Spirit is usually seen primarily as…
WAY back in 1964, as part of the international Shakespeare Quatercentenary celebrations, Joyce Caton and her merry band of actors from Bournemouth and Poole took the first audience to Brownsea, ferried over by a fleet of little boats from Sandbanks to the island in Poole Harbour – and the first words they heard on the…
AVENUE Q broke many barriers when it first appeared on stage in the early years of this century. What had started with the simple idea of taking popular puppets into “crossover” roles, specifically to cast Kermit the frog in the title role of a production of Hamlet, soon developed into a grown up musical with…
THE lactose and gluten intolerant Nashville-based country singer songwriter Gretchen Peters couldn’t help commenting on the name of the venue her agent had chosen for her Cambridge Folk Festival warm up – Frome’s Cheese and Grain – but the room’s history did nothing to prevent her and her excellent band performing a sensational set to…
HANDEL’s Agrippina is a dark story about family jealousies and treachery, extra-marital liaisons and power plotting – so what more natural updating than to the days of Dynasty! That’s how director Bruno Ravella envisaged the final opera in the 2015 Iford Festival, with Alinka Kozari in the title role done up like Joan-Collins-as-Alexis, her rival…
WHO wants to be trapped in a small town in Colorado where the most exciting thing to happen is the tumbleweed blowing down Main, when there’s a chance of global big business on the horizon. That’s the American Dream, and its one that nasty Nate Milton has every night. But his double-crossing ways don’t fool…
THE devil, as they say, gets all the best tunes, and in Ben Occhipinti’s production of Gounod’s Faust, he also gets the best makeup, best movement and most charisma. In the person of young Scottish bass-baritone Colin Brockie, it’s all too easy to see the attraction of Mephistopheles’ promises, and setting the updated but timeless…
THREE of Alan Bennett’s brilliant monologues from the Talking Heads series make up the second show of the Bath Theatre Royal Summer Season, and on until Saturday 8th August. Lady of Letters, which starts the performance, has Siobhan Redmond as the lonely busybody Miss Ruddock. Trapped in her bare flat and alone after the death…
HAVING had such success with Dreamboats and Petticoats, the “juke box” musical written by sitcom experts Marks and Gran (Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart) full of songs from the 1950s which has spawned seven hit albums of such music, producer, and, for this show, director, Bill Kenwright has now worked with the same writers…
AS the audience flooded out of the Coade Hall at Bryanston School on Saturday afternoon, a universal smile of happiness on their faces, it was clear that the 2015 production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore was a triumph. It was one of those productions where everything gelled, a delight for the ears and the eyes and…