MATINEE audiences can be tricky – there are some wonderful stories about remarks made by elderly ladies at matinee performances of Waiting for Godot. The principally late-middle-aged audience that filled Bristol Old Vic to watch this beautifully staged 1930s-style production, were definitely not a great asset to the cast, with their muted and slow reactions…
A FAVOURITE saying of my father, when he had just driven a nice new, but underpowered car was “Lovely bodywork and interior, but couldn’t pull your cap off your head”. It is nowhere as drastic as that, but in many ways, under Loveday Ingram’s carefully structured direction, Ann-Marie Casey’s stage adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s…
PUCCINI’S Madama Butterfly, one of the great staples of romantic opera, is so well known for its earworm Humming Chorus and its aria Un bel di (One Fine Day is a highpoint in every soprano’s repertoire), that you sometimes don’t remember what the story really says about American imperialism and the very different religious and…
THE magnificent setting of Athelhampton House near Puddletown, one of the finest Tudor manor houses in the country, hosts a Tudor household over this half-term. Families are invited to come and experience the sights, sounds and smells of 16th-century life in a re-enactment that takes the onlooker into the everyday life of the people who…
CRAIG Johnson’s Squashbox Theatre comes to Dorset in the October half term for four performances with Artsreach at Child Okeford village hall on Sunday 26th at 3pm, Milborne St Andrew hall on Monday 27th at 2pm, the Mowlem Theatre at Swanage on Tuesday 28th at 2.30pm and Buckland Newton hall on Wednesday 29th. Shivers &…
THERE is something new about the programme for Shaftesbury Arts Centre’s latest production. It is square and the cover names writer Charles Dickens, and, in type just a little bit smaller, adaptor Neil Bartlett and director Diana Banham. In recent years Dickens classics have been dissected and reconstructed by many theatre companies, turning their backs…
AS I entered and exited Bristol Hippodrome, there was an eerie feeling of the ghost of the clergyman who organised a protest when Gracie Fields, on a visit to Bristol, closed her show with a version of The Lords Prayer. What he would have made of Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone’s irreligious satire…
KEN Ludwig has a literary CV that most authors only dream about, and as he has already shown with his adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, he knows how to create those well- known and much-loved Agatha Christie characters on stage. In this touring production he is aided and abetted by his production team….
When two members of Living Spit are overheard bragging about how good they are, Zeus, up there on Olympus, is enraged by their hubris and decides to teach them a lesson –join them as they bring Too Many Greek Myths to Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, and find out how the king of the Greek gods…
THE first version of Candide, with a book by Lillian Helman, met with little success on Broadway and in London’s West End, but, rather like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the show refused to die. Gradually, with a reworked book and lyrics, it has developed into a classic opera. I doubt if any production since…