WARMINSTER’s Limelight Players played to full houses for four nights at the Athenaeum with The Vicar of Dibley: The Second Coming. Based on the 1990s television show (which starred Dawn French as the vicar of a rural parish full of eccentric characters), the show was first staged by the Limelight Players two years ago and…
POOLE’S Lighthouse Centre for the Arts has shone the spotlights onto circus and circus skills in a big way in recent years, so it’s hardly surprising that acrobatics, magic tricks and more big top fun make their way into the current pantomime. Really, Robin Hood isn’t a pantomime, and its inclusion into the genre usually…
BATH Theatre Royal’s dedicated youth theatre space, the egg, is the ideal setting for Matt Harvey’s new version of the (very) Grimm fairy tale, Rumpelstiltskin. It might date back to the late 1400s, but, as this clever adaptation proves, its message is as relevant today as it has always been. With new music by Thomas…
THE magic starts the moment you enter Yeovil Octagon’s wide auditorium for this season’s pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk. Helga Wood has transformed the stage into a veritable vegetable feast, just the thing for a story about beans and peas. And no opportunity for a dreadful (and hilarious) joke is left fallow in this terrific…
WHEN it comes to writing pantomime, Andrew Pollard and Kieran Buckeridge are something of a dream team. Andrew has now written fresh scripts for more than a dozen shows and played dame in most of them. The multi-talented Kieran composes the music, writes the lyrics (with Andrew) and plays dame too, all fitted in round…
HOW many miles to Babylon? The question begins a nursery rhyme first written down in 1801, but probably far older, and the whole rhyme forms part of the folklore tradition that underpins the novel Stardust, by Neil Gaiman, the film adaptation starring Claire Danes and Robert de Niro, and Russ Tunney’s enchanting stage adaptation for…
THE Christmas show at Frome’s Merlin Theatre has built up a reputation for multi media invention and quirky excellence over the years. And for the production of Chris Blackwood and Piers Chater Robinson’s musical version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, returning director Claudia Pepler has excelled herself. Massive puppet figures join atmospheric projections to enhance…
THERE’S something about the English and their dogs, and you couldn’t get more English than Mr and Mrs Dearly, human stars of the Tobacco Factory/Travelling Light production of 101 Dalmatians, on in Bristol until 11th January. Dodie Smith’s immortal story has been brilliantly adapted for this exciting, heart-warming family show, performed by five actors and…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra leader Amyn Merchant Kees Bakels: Conductor Ronald Brautigam: Piano BRITTEN: Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge MENDELSSOHN: Piano Concerto No. 1 MENDELSSOHN: Overture: Fingal’s Cave DEBUSSY: La Mer KEES Bakels, now approaching his 70th birthday, has been a regular and welcome guest conductor in Poole for many years….
THE versatile and talented Studio Theatre Company in Salisbury collects awards locally and nationally and produces a number of varied plays every year at its Ashley Road headquarters. They don’t do musicals and they don’t do pantomimes, so it’s no surprise at this time of year that no-one in the audience is required to shout…