WHEN Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar hit the stage in the early 1970s, it raised the hackles of many ordinary Churchgoers and those in high positions within the Christian Faith. Tim Rice’s oft quoted remark that they did not see Jesus Christ as God, but simply the right man…
IF you have seen The Woman in Black before – and after 33 years in the West End and 11 national tours, many thousands of us have – you will know that it is absolutely terrifying. You can keep your Nightmares on Elm Street or Blair Witch Projects – Susan Hill’s chilling novel, adapted brilliantly…
DAVID Nicholls’ 2003 novel Starter for Ten (and the film that followed it three years later) was based at Bristol University, so what better location for the musical version than the city’s famous Old Vic theatre. For those who missed the book and the movie, it’s about working class Brian, brought up in Southend-on-Sea, whose…
TIM Firth’s stage version of his 2003 hit film Calendar Girls opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2008 as a straight play, based on the true story of the 11 members of the Rylstone and District Women’s Institute who posed for a nude calendar in order to raise money to buy a new settee…
IN the days when youngsters could ride their bicycles around in comparative safety because there were so few cars on the road, many a show off-took their hands off the handlebars with the cry “Look at me. No hands”. When Liam Mower’s Edward Scissorhands, deprived of the use of his hands because they had been…
WE are lucky in this area that from Cheltenham down to Plymouth and points East, there are local musical societies who, without the cushion of public funding, take on the challenge of presenting full-scale musicals in large professional theatres. Many of these productions are a match for, and sometimes superior to, the touring professional productions…
JUST very occasionally in a long life of reviewing plays, you find yourself watching something that you know is special. So special that it will stay in your memory forever, but more importantly will make an indelible mark on all who see it. Arthur Miller’s 1955 play A View from the Bridge must have made…
ALTHOUGH Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel was highly successful, with more than 100 million copies sold, she considered the ending to be a little too dark for theatre-goers to accept, and so changed it to the less bleak one most of us know, and was used in Rene Clair’s atmospheric film version in 1945. Director Lucy…
ARE you a devoted Call the Midwife fan? If so, you’ll know all there is to know about bringing babies into the world in the 1960s, and you’ll know how Dr Turner’s wife Shelagh started her life in Poplar as Sister Bernadette, and is now an experienced midwife in the team. So if you were…
I CANNOT think of a more perfect setting to stage a festival dedicated to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries than the City of Bath. Once again, artistic director Amelia Freedman Came up with a splendid variety of five concerts over a three day period, as she does every year with the…