IN 2019, Before Covid, singer and songwriter Steve Knightley got together with historian Michael Wood to explore the stories of English songs about the working people, and a prototype show was performed All sorts of plans were made to create a show and tour it, but the pandemic stepped in. Now, thankfully, the idea has…
FRANK Loesser’s Guys and Dolls is not only his masterpiece, in a career that was full of clever and witty work, it is also one of the greatest musicals ever. It is entirely of its time – thanks to the brilliance of Damon Runyon’s tales of New York in the 1920s and 30s – yet…
GEOFFREY Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400 and detailing stories of pilgrims on the road from London to Canterbury, have spawned probably hundreds of other stories and plays, but none more heartfelt and natural than Adrian Harding’s Stepping on my Shadow, which has its premiere in Yeovil this week. Adrian has been acting,…
WHEN asked about the show Fisherman’s Friends – the Musical, a member of the actual group Fisherman’s Friends said: “Well, not only did they make a film, which we are not in, now there’s a musical which we are not in as they din’t think we were handsome enough to play ourselves”. Whatever the reason…
JOHN Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and Men was drawn from the writer’s own experiences in California in the Great Depression, and paved the way for what is considered his masterpiece, the Nobel prize winning The Grapes of Wrath. The period has been a fertile ground for literature, drama and music, and, until recently, we…
IT is said that King Henry I died from eating a surfeit of lampreys, and while this new and flamboyant Daisy Evans production was never in danger of dying a theatrical death, it did came close to overwhelming Mozart’s wonderful opera, The Magic Flute. Individually there is little to criticise in Loren Elstein and Jake…
THE world of PG Wodehouse extends its delights from generation to generation, but most fans of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Blandings Castle, Gussie Fink-Nottle et al don’t know much about the man who created them. Playwright William Humble set about to correct that with his solo show, Wodehouse in Wonderland, performed by Robert Daws and playing…
THERE is a dramatic tragedy lurking in the story of a group of about-to-be-made-redundant Rhondda Valley miners reforming their Male Voice Choir, as the once-dominant coal industry begins shrink into insignificance during the 1950s. At its height there were 53 coal mines in the Rhondda. By 1990, only one was left in production. Composer David…
IN amongst his more than 50 novels and dozens of short stories, HG Wells wrote several science fiction works, many at the end of the 19th century, which, with uncanny accuracy, predicted aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television, a form of the world wide web and biological engineering. The Time Machine was Wells’…
RUFUS Norris, director of the National Theatre, has always been keen that his company on London’s South Bank should live up to its name and be a truly NATIONAL theatre, for everyone. Five years ago, Public Acts was set up to pursue this purpose, and the locked-down days of the COVID pandemic gave Norris and…