84 Charing Cross Road must be the unlikeliest best-seller and the unlikeliest stage hit ever (a less unlikely film hit as it starred Anthony Hopkins). Twenty-odd years’ worth of letters between an American bibliophile and a London bookseller, with no action, no changes of location, minimal plot development and no love interest, replete with references…
TALES of Wild Western women have fascinated writers, film-makers and composers over the years, and while many have heard of Annie Oakley, most of us are more familiar with the escapades of Calamity Jane. That could all change with the new show Little Sure Shot, created for West Yorkshire Playhouse, Bath egg, MAC Belfast and…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra Kirill Karabits: Conductor Sally Matthews: Soprano BEETHOVEN: Coriolan Overture R STRAUSS: Four Last Songs SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 9 in C Major “Great” THE hard-working musicians of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra will have richly deserved their Easter break. Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony is notorious for the demands it makes on the players,…
DENNIS Potter’s 1979 work Blue Remembered Hills is well known as one of the most innovative and powerful pieces on his impressive CV. The device of having adult actors play children, using all their skills and expertise to convey the viciousness, mob mentality and vulnerability of childhood, is brilliantly conceived and realised. The play is…
THE 2014/15 season at Market House Music in Castle Cary came to a standing-room-only finale with a visit by Misbehavin’ in the intimate atmosphere of The Shambles. It’s less than two years since the building was converted to provide a performance and exhibition space, and already it has established its place on the local scene,…
THE forces that drive an ordinary soldier and his socially ambitious wife into a downward spiral through assassination and murder to brutal tyranny and suicide are given not one but two new twists in Graham Thomas production of the Scottish play at the Athenaeum, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages project. ALP…
THE rock musical Godspell, first seen in New York in 1971 as a student project, is based mainly on the parables of the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke, and was created for a theatre setting. Performing it in a church, as Motcombe Community Players are doing this week, inevitably gives the show a…
FRANK Wedekind’s startling, stark look at teenage angst, Spring Awakening, has been shocking audiences ever since it was first produced in 1906, and judging by the reaction to the first night of Ian White’s production at Yeovil Swan, it has lost none of its power to disquiet. The Swan Youth Theatre company decided against performing…
WELLS is always a joy to visit and to shop in, with its wide selection of independent shops and popular high street names. But shoppers got more entertainment than they bargained for last Saturday, when Bristol-based Show of Strength theatre company brought Trading Local to the city. The concept of Trading Local is simple but…
RAILWAYS evoke memories – memories of journeys, arrivals and departures, meetings and partings, new adventures and old routines. Leaves On A Line, the new touring show from Forest Forge, draws on all these strands and motifs in a multi-layered play with music. It is touching, funny, exciting and thoughtful. There are fragments of traditional fairy…