MERE Amateur Dramatic Society has one criterion for its Christmas show, and that’s that it must revolve around the town, whether it’s a pantomime, a revue or an adapation. This year co-writers (and co-directors) Chris Wood and Jon Noble have turned to Charles Dickens for their inspiration, setting his familiar story of the miserly Ebenezer…

Elgar               Sea Pictures Brahms          Ein deutsches Requiem Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, director Gavin Carr David Hill:  conductor Jennifer Johnson:  mezzo soprano (Elgar) Emma Bell:  soprano (Brahms) Gareth Brynmor John: baritone THIS week the BSO’s concert at the Lighthouse coupled two nineteenth-century works for orchestra and voices.  In the first half…

TOM Stoppard’s brilliant play Arcadia is so packed full of ideas, information, coded references and wit that you have to keep your attention fully engaged not to miss vital bits of the story. It is set in Sidley Park, ancestral home of the Croom family, in two periods – 1809 and 1995. It’s a mystery,…

BRASS players are often portrayed – with some justification – as the jokers in the orchestral pack. If there is mischief to be done or pranks to be played, chances are it’s the brass players who are at the back of it. There are countless gags about brass players – mostly along the lines of…

YEOVIL Youth Theatre has taken on another big, spectacular show for its Octagon November production, and brings the jazzy sleaze of 1930s Chicago to life, in the High School edition. It’s got all the story and music of the original, with some of the stronger language and sexual references omitted, but you’d have to be…

DAPHNE du Maurier’s tense dramatic novel My Cousin Rachel has twice been filmed  and staged in various adapations countless times. Now a new version by Joseph O’Connor and directed by Anthony Banks comes to Bath Theatre Royal, at the start of a national tour. Without curtains, the audience is first confronted with an atmospheric set…

THE first production by new Dorset company Close to the Mark burst onto the scene in triumph, delighting the packed Shaftesbury audience. It is perhaps the sixth or seventh time I have seen this Ayck­bourn play, written 18 months after The Norman Conquests and certainly following Norman on his disaster-prone  travels through life, now in…

ON Saturday 16th November a group of people gathered at the Discover Church in Hin­ton Road, Bournemouth, for worship of a different kind. We were celebrating the centenary of the Bourne­mouth Little Theatre Club, in what was its home, the former Palace Court Theatre. Sold in 1970, when the audience had turned to television and…

THE names Leonard Elschen­broich and Alexei Grynyuk hardly trip off the tongue like Morecambe and Wise, but musically they are as well knit a team as the great British comedy duo. Opening with a delightful rendition of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A major, in which he coaxed and cajoled in turn the piano to pick…

THERE was a time when baseball addicts in the USA were very fond of Double­headers, two games between the same teams played back to back on the same day. It is stretching the imagination  a little to say that audiences were offered a double header with a String Quartet, plus guests, in the Guildhall at…