FOR a play that was written to be presented as a school production and met with only moderate success when, (with a full music score added) it was first produced professionally, Blood Brothers was a very unlikely candidate for an Olivier Award for best new musical, become one of the West End’s longest running musicals,…
AUDIENCE tastes have changed greatly since the start of this century – the days when a successful US show, like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, failed miserably in this country because they were too American have long gone. As a result, although the mainly British cast did not always capture the essential…
IN the pantheon of 21st century British folk music there is a vast range of styles, voices and instrumentation from the gravelly tones and often angry lyrics of Dick Gaughan to the soaring harmonies and sweet melodies of Dorset duo Ninebarrow. There is a world of difference – emotion, politics, instrumentation and attitude – between…
WHEN the tide goes out at Berrow Beach on the North Somerset coast (and remember that the tidal range of the Severn Estuary is the second larges in the world), you can see the timbers of a boat emerging from the sand. She is the SV Nornen, and she went down on 3rd March 1897 in…
ONE of the most famously memorable phrases uttered on the silver screen since in 1927 Al Jolson declared ‘You ain’t heard nothing yet’ in The Jazz Singer, the film which heralded the beginning of the Talkies, came six years later in the film 42nd Street, from which this show is taken. The whole future of…
MASSENET’S exotic and dramatic opera Le Roi de Lahore is rarely performed now, but the huge success of its opening at the Paris Opera in 1877 cemented the composer’s position as one of the most popular in Europe, and the work became a regular feature of operatic seasons. When Rod Kennedy decided to stage it…
AFTER my mother died, I inherited a little oil painting of a sailing vessel. I knew it from my parents’ house but had never looked on the back of it (why would I?) When I did, I found a typed note with the story of the boat and of my great-great grandfather, who had sailed…
BEN Weatherill’s new play Frank and Percy, a two-hander for Sir Ian McKellen and Roger Allam, is at Bath until 5th August, and there’s hardly a seat to be had. Perhaps the bright “young” London critics who slated the play at its Windsor opening will attribute that to an older, more staid audience in the…
THEY say it is hard to keep a secret, but it can’t be that difficult because well over 10 MILLION people over a 70 year period have managed to keep the identity of the murderer to themselves after seeing a production of The Mousetrap. That is the audience numbers recorded firstly in London’s Ambassadors Theatre,…
SOMETIMES, the weather gods just get their own way, and all the determination of summer touring actors and the stoicism of their audiences goes for naught. Such was the case when Slapstick Picnic planned to return to the wild, wide open spaces of Dorchester’s Maumbury Rings and the wind howled and the rain poured. And…