ON the front of the programme for this show there is a note informing  this is an amateur production. Many people still confuse the word amateur, which comes from the French word for “lover of”, with amateurish, a description that most certainly can not be applied to Maisie Carter’s production for Bath Operatic and Dramatic…

AUSTRALIAN author Thomas Keneally, from whose novel The Playmaker Timberlake Wertenbaker created this play, is a master at using historical facts and people as the basis for a fictional work without loosing the honesty of those facts and people. The best known example of this is his Booker prize winning novel Schindler’s Ark, later to…

MILBORNE Port Opera, set up in 1990 to sing Gilbert and Sullivan, has branched out in another new direction, choosing Cole Porter’s Anything Goes for the annual show. There are also three directors, which makes for lots of new ideas, many of which work well. The big difference for the audience is that the story…

IT’S a real treat to turn up to a concert by a favourite artist and discover that you are part of a live recording – and so it was for the audience at St George’s in Bristol on Good Friday. The Nashville-based songwriter, with her bandleader, arranger and husband Barry Walsh and this time accompanied…

ALL three of the Operas WNO has chosen for its Spring tour have strong-willed women at the heart of their stories. Amelia whose love for her country’s political  leader Riccardo leads to his downfall, was brought vividly to life by Mary Elizabeth Williams in David Pountney’s production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. After a fairly…

ROCK of Ages has acquired a lighter look since it last came to this part of the world with quite a few of the characters happily sending up themselves and the part of the story about a Nazi-style business man’s attempt to buy up The Strip, close the clubs and turn it into a commercial…

THE children’s writer Michael Morpurgo, author of Private Peaceful and Warhorse, said: “When children are very young, you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read…

TAMARA von Werthern’s inventive and rivetting play The White Bike was created in London and was site-specific  for that audience. When ImpAct Theatre’s director Patricia Richardson acquired permission to stage the first amateur production in Dorset, she worked closely with the writer,  and relocated the action to the Boscombe, Bournemouth, and Branksome area, familiar to…

LAURA Wade’s latest award-winning play Home, I’m Darling, more than lives up to all the rapturous national reviews. The extraordinarily varied writer has created a seemingly artificial world which is the only reality that central character Judy knows.  Brought up in a 60s commune, she has swallowed hook, line and sinker the advertising promises of…

FROME’S Tri.Art Theatre School and Dance Academy is on a roll. The 2018 summer school production In the Heights was chosen as best youth theatre in Somerset for the year, and now the dance section has staged, almost incredibly in one week, a sensational production of Peter Pan at the Merlin Theatre. What links them…