WHEN Sasha Regan sets out to direct a new all-male production of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, she doesn’t adapt or change the original – she simply wants to tell the story and transport the audience “into a make-believe world full of laughter and tears.” And she does just that brilliantly in this revival of…
ROBERT Harling’s family-inspired play Steel Magnolias was first performed 35 years ago, since when it has become a regular choice on stages across the English-speaking world. Many people know it from the classic 1989 film, and its popularity crosses professional and amateur productions. But it’s not all plain sailing – the professional national tour that…
THE opening bars of Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman rank amongst the most immediately recognised musical themes in operatic music. Like so much of the composer’s work, it bursts upon you with ferocity of a shell fired from a Schwerer Gustav cannon. But Wagner’s telling of the legendary tale (he wrote the words as…
HARRY Hill and his Bath-born co-writer Steve Brown first envisaged their Tony Blair show as a jukebox musical, but, as Hill hated the genre, it turned into a musical tragi-comedy with original (if derivative) song and dance routines, aimed at putting the “party” into politics. Back in 2020 he hadn’t reckoned on Badly Thatched Boy…
FOR 25 years The Rude Mechanicals have been creating magical productions and touring them around the country, performing in the commedia dell’arte style and delighting packed audiences, many of whose members believe that summer isn’t summer without a trip to the Rudes. The 2023 show, another Pete Talbot original called Miss Popplewell’s Garden, is a…
THE opening “summer show” at Bath Theatre Royal – a “new” musical with songs by Cole Porter – is a joyful, tender, funny and totally charming delight. It is a musical version of William Wyler’s 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday, which starred Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck and is now regarded as a classic of…
THE all-male touring company The Lord Chamberlain’s Men is back in Wiltshire at Breamore House on 26th August with its 2023 touring production of the world’s favourite and best-known love story, Romeo and Juliet, already seen at Salisbury earlier in the tour. It’s a massive undertaking and one that annually delights audiences – more than…
LEAVE any thoughts of the classic 1935 MGM or 1948 Alexander Korda romantic films, starring Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh, at the door – Lesley Hart’s new interpretation of Leo Tolstoy’s 800-plus page novel is far more realistically gritty than either of those. The writer and director Polina Kalinina keeps the story visually fixed in…
POLLY Lamb burst onto the Frome theatre scene during the Covid outbreak, creating entertaining monologues about women’s lives during the isolated times, and then combining them into a show called Lockdown Blues, which sold out at the 2022 Frome Festival and went on to thrill audiences at Bath Theatre Royal’s pop-up festival in late February….
THE prodigiously talented trio of writer John Finnemore, actor Rachel Fletcher and director Lesley Bates are the ingredients for a theatrical recipe made in heaven, and audiences at Salisbury’s Studio Theatre are enjoying their latest iteration in English for Pony Lovers, in a double bill with an abridged-and-then-abridged-again adaptation of Buchan’s The 39 Steps, by…