THE Merlin Theatre Productions Christmas show this year is a community presentation of a new version of Cinderella, written and directed by Claudia Pepler with new music by Joseph Church. Making full use of the wide, deep stage, with a 45-strong cast, this is a fresh reading of the original story that inspired the world’s…
THIS year the posters advertising Christmas shows are jostling for space with those pushing candidates for a general election. Both have their pantomime elements, but if it’s fun, good humour, slick jokes, colourful costumes and a large dose of love that you want, I’d suggest Salisbury Playhouse’s Robin Hood. It’s Good Good Good! It was…
SO successful was last season’s production of A Christmas Carol at Bristol Old Vic that they decided to bring it back again for 2019/20, with some new music and a substantially new cast. This time John Hopkins is at its centre, a more vulnerable Ebenezer Scrooge than Felix Hayes’s sonorous curmudgeon last Christmas, and more…
JUST how difficult IS it to sleep on the night before Christmas, when you’re waiting for the sound of Santa’s reindeer in the sky? You can find out in the studio theatre at Bristol Old Vic until 5th January, when Travelling Light brings its favourite show back to the historic venue. This time the performers…
IF you want the perfect alternative Christmas show, look no further than Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, where a wonderful new version of Snow White is on stage until 19th January. Adapted by Mike Tweddle and the company, and directed by Alex Byrne, it manages that gargantuan challenge of being woke, politically aware, plant-based and very, very…
THE 21st of the 80-plus plays written by Alan Ayckbourn Ten Times Table comes from the 1970s, one of the most prolific and successful periods in his writing career. No fewer than 17 of his plays were successfully professionally produced at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough and London’s West End during this decade. This…
AFTER five years of turn-of-the-year touring, Bumblefly Theatre has built up a tradition of opening on a Saturday afternoon at Greyfriars in Ringwood, and this year is no exception. The 2019/20 show is David Haworth’s new version of Little Red Riding Hood, peppered with the company’s usual selection of fairy stories and folk tales from…
AFTER the triumph of last year’s award-winning Christmas show, David Walliams’ Billionaire Boy, the city centre Nuffield Theatre had a hard act to follow, and has sensibly taken a very different approach for the 2019/20 production. This is the world’s favourite pantomime story, Cinderella, but not as you know it. In Michael Fentiman’s adaptation, which…
ACTOR and playwright Stewart Permutt’s play One Last Card Trick is a delightfully humorous, poignant and beautifully-observed study of a failing community. Chosen by KCA Players for their final production of 2019, and sensitively directed by Steve Watton, it is the story of three elderly Jewish women whose weekly tradition is to meet at their…
WHY do we love Blackadder? He is really an awful person, ridicules his devoted friend Lord Percy, treats his (admittedly squalid) servant Baldrick like something he might kick into the gutter, and generally would have been at home lording it over the Bullingdon Club in any century. There is something refreshing about his arrogance, his…