TAUNTON’S Brewhouse Theatre has a professional Christmas show again this year, created by Kickline at the invitation of the new board of management. The company decided to weave their musical around the legends of King Arthur, which are richly rooted in Somerset, and the result is Merlin’s Apprentice, with a script and lyrics by director…
PUTTING on a pantomime in the 21st century seems to have created problems (or “issues”, as we now call them) for theatres and directors. Is it politically correct? Do today’s children (aka young people) want to see men dressed as colourful and improbable women, or girls dressed as thigh-slapping high-camp boys? Are stories about sibling…
THE entrance to the Tobacco Factory auditorium in Bedminster has been decked out like a castle, with colourful climbing roses and twinkling lights, and the stage, surrounded on three sides by audience seating, is similarly packed with the apparatus of enchantment. This is for The Light Princess, the Christmas show produced by the venue in…
BRISTOL is currently on the crest of an artistic wave, and native director Sally Cookson is high on that spumy horizon, with smash hit productions of Jane Eyre and Hetty Feather doing the rounds, recent memories of 101 Dalmatians at the Tobacco Factory last Christmas and now Sleeping Beauty, the 2015-16 show at Bristol Old…
I CAN’T think of a more delightful way to introduce young children into the fun and excitement of live theatre than to go to Bristol Old Vic Studio for the Little Bulb production of The Night that Autumn turned into Winter, on until Sunday 10th January. The company, with two of the same actors, brought…
I HAVE been looking forward to this production since early this year, when news reached me that a local school with an outstanding musical pedigree was planning to stage the schools edition of my favourite musical. I have seen half a dozen or so productions of this version, including in my home town of Gillingham,…
Sibelius: The Tempest Suite Grieg: Piano Concerto Sibelius: Symphony No. 7 Sibelius: Tapiola Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Juho Pohjonen: Piano GETTING the balance right between the crowd-pulling ‘warhorses’ of the classical repertoire and equally-rewarding but less familiar music must be a constant preoccupation for the BSO’s management. Revenue must be…
MAGIC takes many forms. It can be good, it can be evil, it can charm and it can terrify. And all of it can be found in the pages of books, which, in these days of brightly-lit tablets, phones and gizmos, provide a mysterious enchantment. The Nuffield Theatre’s Christmas show this year is Merlin, written…
MOIRA Buffini’s hit play Handbag ged, which ends its 13-venue 2015 UK tour at Bath on Saturday 5th December, is the hilarious imagined story of the meetings between Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher between 1979 and 1990. It’s such recent history that most members of the audience have bits of…
ALAN Ayckbourn is one of Britain’s most popular playwrights and probably the favourite living writer with amateur groups (run a very close second by the other Alan – Bennett). Warminster’s Athenaeum Limelight Players chose his Seasons Greetings for their December show at the atmospheric old theatre – a black comedy that tarnishes the tinsel on the…