THE first thought that comes to mind when you see the title The Drifters Girl, is “what girl?” The Drifters, formed originally in the 1950s, were, and presumably still are, an all male American R&B soul vocal group – so who is the girl. She was the formidable Faye Treadwell, who with her husband George,…
BACK in 2011, when pronouns were nothing more than another boring bit of grammar you were supposed to learn at school, a 16-year-old boy in a former mining village in County Durham decided to go to his school prom in a frock, and Googled his way to contacting a documentary film company which would record…
AFTER many decades of bringing Eastern European opera and ballet companies to tour the UK, Raymond Gubbay and his rival impresario Ellen Kent can vouch for the fact that it is an enormous financial and artistic challenge. Gubbay’s latest promotion, setting the Bulgarian- based Varna International Ballet company out on a 21-venue, 52 performance tour…
WHEN you come to think about it, Lewis Carroll’s immortal story Alice in Wonderland has a surreal and game-like quality about it, so no surprise that Joshua Coley should have chosen it for a “reloaded” pantomime, and so Strode Theatre Productions are staging the sparkling new show for Christmas 2023 There are so many good…
WRITING a review of this the Christmas offering (it runs until 30th December) in the Tobacco Factory Theatre’s intimate Speilman Studio is fraught with danger, because it is the perfect example of every performance being a one off. The two Sisters of Shesus, dressed as nuns, their faces covered in very unlikely garish thick makeup,…
YOU know the story – the boy who can fly, the boy who never grew up, the boy who lives with a tribe of Lost Boys in Neverland, where he constantly battles with the evil Captain Hook, the boy who is looking for a mother … But what about that mother figure? Wendy – stolid,…
THE importance of Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was immediately recognised, and the film, made four years later, starred Hollywood’s hottest couple, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton two years into their first marriage, in the central parts of Martha and George. Since then, the roles have been performed by the world’s…
YOU almost certainly know the story of Aladdin, most recently thanks to Disney and various films, but if the back story is missing, you will need to go to Poole to find out more. Local pantomime favourite Chris Jarvis has not only written and directed this new version, but also stars as Widow Twankey, mother…
CINDERELLA is the most popular of all pantomimes, so it was the natural choice for the displaced Yeovil Octagon team as the first (of hopefully a very small number) of pantos to be staged at Westlands, their temporary home while the Octagon refurbishment progresses. And it is a triumph! The Octagon pantomime has got better…
Oliver Twist or The Parish Boy’s, Progress Charles Dickens second novel is also one of his darkest stories. How then do you make such a story acceptable as a Christmas entertainment without destroying the essential fabric of this wonderfully atmospheric story, and its fierce attack on Victorian society’s attitude towards the poor? Lionel Bart succeeded…