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…
IS there a more mysteriously creepy story in all of opera and “serious” fiction than Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, orchestrated by Benjamin Britten? Forests have been felled to provide the trees for the paper on which generations of experts, philosophers, students and musicologists have written their thoughts on the meaning of this…
IN a world of tinsel and jingle bells, Edward Albee’s classic 1962 play of domestic misery on an American campus is a start contrast, but that’s what is on offer at Strode Theatre Studio in Street from 14th to 16th December. Neil Howiantz directs the Strode Theatre Productions version of the play, which will be…
THIS is the 11th time that Andy Ford has led the comedy output in a Hippodrome panto, and in more than one of those of shows he has had to carry that burden almost single-handedly propping up high profile personalities with little stage experience. This time its a different story with M. Poirot David Suchet,…
IF you are following talented young Street actor-singer Toby Turley on I Have a Dream*, the quest for the new Sky and Sophie for the West End’s Mamma Mia, you will know that the ingredients for a perfect theatre on-stage partnership are not only acting (or singing) ability but also that intangible quality, chemistry. If…
BRISTOL’S Old Vic Theatre is transformed into a magical city state in Arabia this Christmas. There’s a palace, a prison and a house where some of the “ordinary people” live, as well as sea monsters and a marvellous flying horse. And Schere is telling her stories to the petulant and babyish king. This brilliant retelling…
TELEVISION scriptwriter Reginald Rose was called to serve on a New York jury in 1954, and his experiences in the locked jury room inspired him to write what became his best-known play, performed countless times on stages across the English speaking world and famously filmed with Henry Fonda in the lead. It is a timelessly…
TWENTY years ago the members of Mere Amateur Dramatic Society staged Peter Gordon’s spoof murder mystery Murdered to Death, to great acclaim by the audience who named it the funniest play the company has ever done. So it’s no surprise that director Chris Wood (who played the more-than-bumbling Inspector Pratt in the 2003 production) decided…
ONE of the criticisms leveled at the musical Annie is that it is too sweet and sentimental, and to an extent that is probably true, which only goes to prove how far this feelgood musical adaptation of the adventures of Little Orphan Annie, the comic strip that was printed in American newspapers from 1924 to…