HAPPY is exactly how the audience felt at the end of the first night of this brand new musical in Bristol, based on the television series of the same name and written by its creator Garry Marshall. The title song appears reassuringly early in the show, crops up as part of another song along the…

WHEN this Original Theatre Company touring production of Sebastian Faulk’s famous First World War novel opened last year, a friend who is a big fan of the book said she thought it was more powerful and intense than the television adaptation. She was right. It is grittier, darker, noisier, more urgent, more passionate and more…

ROSIE King has not only directed this year’s Community Pantomime at Motcombe, but has also written it, crafting a script that includes all of the required characters, plus a few others, along with jokes old and new and many favourite routines, from the fragile parcel ruined by the actions of the comedy team, via the…

WITH some brilliant cameos, jolly songs, corny jokes, colourful costumes and a very stylish set, COMPACT’s production of Sinbad the Sailor at Child Okeford sparkled from start to finish. Even the safety regulations (together with the inevitable reminder to turn off our mobile phones) were part of the act and helped get the audience in…

FINALLY, I am convinced by Terry Pratchett on stage. I knew that as a writer he was witty and clever with an endlessly inventive storyteller’s imagination. I knew that he had millions of fans. I live in a town that is “twinned” with his fictional city of Ankh Morpork and has a Discworld Emporium with…

THERE is one essential element for a village pantomime, and that is that everyone – the cast, the crew and the audience – needs to be involved. And it’s impossible to think of a more successful example of the genre than this year’s Cinderella from Buckhorn Amateur Theatrical Society at Buckhorn Weston Village Hall. Alison…

THERE is something of a fashion to adapt vast novels for the stage in two or more parts, most of them involving large casts and vast sets. But the current show at Bristol Old Vic, a new working of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre devised by the cast under the direction of Sally Cookson, is on…

UNTIL a few hours ago, I would have failed miserably if asked who wrote the Beatles song Till There Was You: I would have said Lennon and McCartney before hearing it sung beautifully by Sarah Linehan and Luke Whitchurch in CATS production of The Music Man, but I now know it is written, as is the…

SHAKESPEARE at the Tobacco Factory, the company set up by Andrew Hilton 15 years ago on the cigar packing floor of the former Wills factory in Bedminster, Bristol, celebrates its anniversary with the pairing of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Bristol-trained playwright Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. The first, which is running until 2nd May at…

NOEL Coward’s hilarious play Fallen Angels, on an eight-venue UK tour, has an extended run at Bath Theatre Royal until 1st March, and is the perfect antidote to the doom and gloom of persistent rain and wind. Written in a time of creative ferment, while The Master was performing in the West End AND writing…