I HAVE been struggling to find superlatives that adequately describe Frome’s Merlin Theatre production of Come From Away, on stage until Saturday 19th July. It is breathtakingly marvellous, powerful, poignant and astonishingly skillfully and soulfully done by both the 12-strong cast and the musicians in the ten-piece band. We will never forget the worldwide impact of…
DORSET-based composer Rick Birley is celebrated in a chamber concert at St Mary’s Church, Dorchester, on Saturday 19th July, at 7.30pm. The concert will showcase some of Birley’s chamber compositions, brought to life by some of the county’s finest musicians. Leora Cohen (violin), accompanied by Duncan Honeybourne (piano), will play three of Rick’s striking works…
SINGER-actor, chairman of the company, set mover … first-time director – John Clark certainly took on a lot of roles for Bath Opera’s summer tour of Verdi’s La Traviata. An experienced director of plays and musicals and regular performer, John has this year also tackled the challenge of directing one of the best-loved of all…
I MUST have seen Michael Frayn’s enduringly hilarious play Noises Off more than a dozen times during my reviewing life, with TV stars, leading West End actors, the Number 3 touring professional companies that it sends up, and by amateurs. I have never seen a production so wonderfully inventive and brilliantly performed as that by…
RODGERS and Hammerstein’s last musical together, The Sound of Music, was first performed only 14 years after the end of the Second World War, when memories of Nazi incursions over Europe were fresh in the minds of audiences. Now, the details of that war are unfamiliar to younger viewers, but, thanks to the powerful story…
THE first performances of David Hare’s new play Grace Pervades offer a unique opportunity to theatre lovers – to sit in one of the country’s most beautiful theatres learning fascinating facts about Victorian theatre legends Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, from a stage on which they actually performed. And, for these days of breathless star-struckery,…
IF you have reached the stage when you think “O no, not another juke box musical”, think again – because this stage version of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film leaves the rest of them trailing in its wake. Practically every number, from the spectacularly-staged The Sparkling Diamond to the haunting Nature Boy, fits the storyline, which…
SIDMOUTH’s Manor Pavilion theatre hosts its annual summer season of plays in repertory from Monday 23rd June to mid-September. The season, at the seaside town’s Manor Pavilion theatre, is now said to be the longest running continuous summer rep in the country. Over 12 weeks, local theatre-goers and holiday-makers are entertained with a programme of…
HENRY V – Marquis of Anglesea rather than he of “once more into the breach” – is the extraordinary subject of Seiriol Davies’s show How to Win Against History, which has its first fully-staged production at Bristol’s beautiful Old Vic Theatre … made even more exotically, fantastically beautiful in Hayley Grindle’s Cabinet of Curiosities set….
THRILLER writer Peter James is keen to point out that his creation Roy Grace is HMQ Camilla’s favourite detective, and it is he who leads the investigation in Picture You Dead, the seventh and latest James novel to be dramatised for the theatre, touring the UK until the end of July. Mr James, whose Brighton-based…