WHEN five cleaning ladies, dressed in late 18th century clothes, but with modern boots instead of delicate slippers on their feet, took over the stage with the house lights still up, and informed the audience that they were going to tell them the tale of Pride and Prejudice from their point of view, you could…
ONE morning in February 1987, very early, we left our hotel in Spindleruv Mlyn by bus, headed for what was marked the “Friendship Path” on the map – the border between what was then Czechoslovakia and Poland, high in the Czech Krkonose mountains. Thick snow was on the ground. We had taken breakfast with a…
IF you had asked me to nominate when Cher first burst on the pop music scene with her 12- years-senior husband Sonny Bono, (played by Lucas Rush), topping the US and UK charts with I Got You Babe, it certainly would have been much later than 1965. At this time, very much under the influence…
EDWARD Albee’s 1962 masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, set in the home of college history teacher George and his wife Martha, daughter of the college founder, has lost none of its power in the more than 60 years since it was first staged. It has been filmed (with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in…
GLEE – defined as “great delight, especially from one’s own good fortune or another’s misfortune”. Glee – a popular American television series set in high school, about the rights of passage of teenagers, at whom it is aimed. Glioma – a brain cancer. Stuart Slade wrote Glee and Me in 2019, and its audacious style…
ALAN Ayckbourn’s first hit play, Relatively Speaking, was originally performed in 1965, when life was very, very different. What isn’t different is people, and it is that certainty that makes the UK’s most prolific playwright an enduring legend. This is a play set in the “swinging sixties”, a time when sexual freedom was big news,…
The Story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons DURING the 1940s, the big Hollywood studios were notorious for airbrushing out all the unpleasant aspects of the lives of famous musicians. MGM’S Till the Clouds Roll By (1945) and Words and Music (1948) and Warner Brothers’ Rhapsody in Blue (1945) and Night and Day (1946)…
IN this modern era, to set out on a 24-venue tour with a programme of four classic ballets which require not only quality principal dancers and a full Corps de Ballet and orchestra, you have to have either great courage or complete disregard for your personal bank balance – and probably a little stupidity. The…
THE Middle Temple Hall, with its magnificent double hammer-beam roof, was completed in 1573. William Shakespeare performed there. Student Charles Dickens wrote some of his most popular works during his time at the Temple. So what more fitting and atmospheric venue to perform his classic Christmas Carol? That was how theatre company Antic Disposition thought…
YEOVIL’S Octagon Theatre, built as the multi-purpose Johnson Hall in 1974, will close in April for a major refurbishment that will cement its position as the largest performing arts venue in Somerset – and it’s doing it with a huge, hilarious and glorious Christmas show. The annual pantomime is always a highlight of the year,…