AFTER many decades of bringing Eastern European opera and ballet companies to tour the UK, Raymond Gubbay and his rival impresario Ellen Kent can vouch for the fact that it is an enormous financial and artistic challenge. Gubbay’s latest promotion, setting the Bulgarian- based Varna International Ballet company out on a 21-venue, 52 performance tour…
WHEN you come to think about it, Lewis Carroll’s immortal story Alice in Wonderland has a surreal and game-like quality about it, so no surprise that Joshua Coley should have chosen it for a “reloaded” pantomime, and so Strode Theatre Productions are staging the sparkling new show for Christmas 2023 There are so many good…
WRITING a review of this the Christmas offering (it runs until 30th December) in the Tobacco Factory Theatre’s intimate Speilman Studio is fraught with danger, because it is the perfect example of every performance being a one off. The two Sisters of Shesus, dressed as nuns, their faces covered in very unlikely garish thick makeup,…
YOU know the story – the boy who can fly, the boy who never grew up, the boy who lives with a tribe of Lost Boys in Neverland, where he constantly battles with the evil Captain Hook, the boy who is looking for a mother … But what about that mother figure? Wendy – stolid,…
THE importance of Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was immediately recognised, and the film, made four years later, starred Hollywood’s hottest couple, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton two years into their first marriage, in the central parts of Martha and George. Since then, the roles have been performed by the world’s…
YOU almost certainly know the story of Aladdin, most recently thanks to Disney and various films, but if the back story is missing, you will need to go to Poole to find out more. Local pantomime favourite Chris Jarvis has not only written and directed this new version, but also stars as Widow Twankey, mother…
CINDERELLA is the most popular of all pantomimes, so it was the natural choice for the displaced Yeovil Octagon team as the first (of hopefully a very small number) of pantos to be staged at Westlands, their temporary home while the Octagon refurbishment progresses. And it is a triumph! The Octagon pantomime has got better…
Oliver Twist or The Parish Boy’s, Progress Charles Dickens second novel is also one of his darkest stories. How then do you make such a story acceptable as a Christmas entertainment without destroying the essential fabric of this wonderfully atmospheric story, and its fierce attack on Victorian society’s attitude towards the poor? Lionel Bart succeeded…
IS there a more mysteriously creepy story in all of opera and “serious” fiction than Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, orchestrated by Benjamin Britten? Forests have been felled to provide the trees for the paper on which generations of experts, philosophers, students and musicologists have written their thoughts on the meaning of this…
IN a world of tinsel and jingle bells, Edward Albee’s classic 1962 play of domestic misery on an American campus is a start contrast, but that’s what is on offer at Strode Theatre Studio in Street from 14th to 16th December. Neil Howiantz directs the Strode Theatre Productions version of the play, which will be…