STARTING life in 2001 as an autobiographical novel by an American girl whose bubbly personality and obsession with fashion and beauty had made her the laughing stock of fellow students at Stanford law school, Legally Blonde rapidly became a hit film and then an internationally successful musical. Eighteen years on and I must confess to…
LIKE many supporters of Arsenal Football Club, and their manager Arsene Wenger, I have been frustrated by their performances over the past few seasons where time after time inconsistency and individual errors have prevented them from attaining the heights their undoubted talents deserved. The result was that after 21years in charge, during which he had…
Schumann Manfred Overture Dvořák Violin Concerto Brahms Symphony No. 2 Conductor Clemens Schuldt Baiba Skride, violin “PASTORAL Brahms”, we were promised by the programme. Brahms’s second symphony was written hard on the heels of his long-awaited first in 1877 when the composer was in his mid-forties. It is often seen as a relaxed, pastoral piece,…
ALFRED Hitchcock’s 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, adapted for the stage by Antony Lampard, is currently touring in a production directed by Roy Marsden. It opens in an Austrian railway station, impressively designed by Morgan Large and atmospherically lit by Charlie Morgan Jones. There has been an avalanche and the train is delayed. The Anschluss…
SYRIAN music is not something most of us have the opportunity to hear live, at least not on our native soil. The last time I had the chance to hear anything remotely similar to last night’s concert was almost 30 years ago now – just outside Aleppo in fact – but that’s another story. Suffice…
SUGGEST to most people, including lovers of ballet and show dancing, that they come to an evening of Modern Contemporary Dance and they would probable have made a dash for the door before you could go into details of the programme on offer. Such a blinkered approach robs many a dance enthusiast of the pleasure…
THIS is the third or fourth time I have heard and enjoyed the music of the Pagoda Project. Although the ensemble appears in a number of different manifestations, the linchpins are invariably the same – the charismatic and highly versatile duo of Karen Wimhurst (clarinets) and Paul Hutchinson (accordion). As their website says, Pagoda Project…
THERE’S nothing quite like a traditional village pantomime, in which anyone who wants to take part can be sure of satisfaction. The writers, adapting time-tested stories, can add and subtract characters at will, and the result will always be real community spirit and even more family/audience participation at the performances. Such a panto group is…
ANGELA Carter’s final novel, a paeon to the world of theatre, was the perfect vehicle for Emma Rice to launch her new theatre company, hoisting two brightly-painted, fairy-light adorned fingers to the naysayers at Shakespeare’s Globe. Already a smash hit in London, it starts its UK tour at Bristol Old Vic, itself dripping with history,…
SO, we all loved the penguins. As John Ruskin said: “One can’t be angry when one looks at a Penguin” – which is another way of saying that penguins make us smile. Hang on – this is The Nutcracker. Christmas tree, tick; magician, tick; toy soldiers, tick; wooden nutcracker, tick; rats, tick; sugar plum fairy, tick….