TO be sitting in the gorgeously ornate interior of Sherborne Abbey on a sunny May afternoon, the sunlight filtering through the stained glass, was almost treat enough: but then the eight young ensemble singers of the London-based Fieri Consort diffidently assembled on the stage, and, without the guidance of a conductor, launched into the Choral…
IT was still light outside the Big School Room at Sherborne School as Stacey Kent and her band took to the stage. But the mood was a little after midnight with Stacey’s smoky vocals, Jim Tomlinson’s sultry saxophone and a sophisticated mix of old favourites, bossa nova and new songs. Stacey Kent is one of…
THE glorious architecture of Sherborne Abbey and its fine artworks from across the centuries, including Marzia Colonna’s 2004 sculpture of St Aldhelm, provided the perfect setting for an illustrated talk by the Bishop of Salisbury, the Right Rev Nicholas Holtam, on the opening day of the 2014 Sherborne Abbey Festival. The Bishop’s talk on The…
FULL marks to Sherborne School Swing Band, whose dazzling performance on the opening day of the fifteenth Sherborne Abbey Festival was given before an enthusiastic and rather more than capacity audience. Despite extra chairs being magicked out from behind the woodwork by beaming, blazered boys, there was standing room only in the Tindall Recital Hall…
EIGHT actors are currently touring the country in a new play by Stella Feehily, urging their audiences not to sit and watch but to get up and fight. The fight is for the existence of the National Health Service and the play, This May Hurt a Bit, is a brilliantly conceived work of agit-prop that…
THERE was a time when most visitors to London wanted to see a “show” and that meant a musical and those musicals ran for years and years and years. And it was that pattern that Cameron Mackintosh expected to follow with his 2011 show Betty Blue Eyes, based on the beloved film A Private Function,…
EVEN now, centuries after the word “Bedlam” struck fear into people’s hearts as the madhouse, a terrifying place of violence, cruelty, chains and ignorance, the word still has connotations of chaos. But the play Bedlam, written by Nell Leyshon for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at Southwark, finds not only some meaning in the chaos but also…
IT’S often said that there is a good reason for “rarities” from established playwrights and composers, and that is because the works are inferior. So it is with Gilbert and Sullivan’s penultimate collaboration, Utopia Ltd, which preceded the final opera, The Grand Duke, itself an immediate failure. But for Milborne Port Opera, celebrating its 24th…
RAIN opens and closes this intense two-hander, played with honesty and truth in the intimate Ustinov Studio at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and the steady rain of the title pervades the narrative, only ending once the angst and tragedy of the play has been resolved. A Steady Rain broke weekly box-office records for a non-musical…
THE great excitement about the current production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Things We Do for Love at Bath is the stage debut of Australian singer and actress Natalia Imbruglia. This 1997 play is perfunctorily dismissed on Wikipedia as the story of a woman who begins an affair with her best friend’s fiance, only for it to…