AS any top class chef will tell you, high quality ingredients are required if you are to produce a memorable meal. And with the team behind this production – set and costume designer Lez Brotherston, lighting and sound designers Paule Constable, and Paul Groothuis, plus a classic fairytale set to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s haunting music,…
RYAN Craig’s stark new love story, Charlotte and Theodore, has its premiere at Bath’s Ustinov Studio until 18th March, from where it will undoubtedly travel to a well-deserved spot in London. Bitingly modern, it looks at ten years in the lives of two philosophers, caught in the constantly undulating flux of opinion and fashion on established…
FOUR years and a pandemic since the first national tour of Laura Wade’s thought-provoking satirical play Home, I’m Darling last visited Bath, the new cast in the same production arrives in the city, and for those who remember April 2019, it’s the same brilliantly observed set from Anna Fleischle. The story centres on Judy and…
A FAVOURITE remark of one of the BBC’S most experienced producers when giving advice to inexperienced young people following in his footsteps was “always start your programme with something attention grabbing and finish with something memorable. If you have any suspect or weak material hide it in the middle of the show”. Looking at the…
THERE are just a handful of musicals which, like great actors, dominate the stage the moment they appear, standing head and shoulders above the rest of the herd. My Fair Lady, along with Oklahoma and Show Boat, is such a musical. No one-hit-wonder this show, a big success when first produced, but rarely seen afterwards….
WHEN a stage play is rapidly turned into a wildly successful movie, it is very hard for the average audience to rid its memory of the images of the starry leading actors. So it is with Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, immortalised in 1990 on film by Dolly Parton, Olympia Dukakis, Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Shirley…
ALAN Ayckbourn is as popular as he is prolific, so it’s no great surprise, as a reviewer, to see two of his plays in quick succession. An interesting contrast, though, as the productions (both excellent) are his first big success Relatively Speaking, which was at Bath, and How The Other Half Loves, at Salisbury Playhouse,…
THE members of Salisbury’s Studio Youth Theatre chose Russ Tunney’s highly-praised adaptation of Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (the first of her long series of Wolves books) for the first show of 2023, on at the theatre in Ashley Road until Saturday 18th February. Set in a time that never was – the…
Akimenko Nocturne Glazunov From the Middle Ages: Prelude Tanayev St John of Damascus Shostakovich Symphony No 4 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Bournemouth Symphony Chorus Kiril Karabits: Conductor LAST month the BSO announced that Kiril Karabits would be ending his tenure as chief conductor in the summer of 2024 after 15 years. Karabits’s…
THE current touring production of Phil Porter’s adaptation of The Lavender Hill Mob started its national progress last October and ends next weekend in Cornwall. Directed by Jeremy Sams, it stars Miles Jupp and Justin Edwards with a further six multi-role-playing actors to bring to life this stage version of the classic 1951 Ealing comedy,…