THIS show, which pays tribute to 1950s singer/songwriter Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holley, has been wowing his fans for almost a dozen more years than he actually lived. Buddy was only 22 years old when, along with two other top rock‘n’roll stars(Ritchie Valens and J P Richardson, aka The Big Bopper,) he was killed when the…
NOEL Coward’s classic Brief Encounter started life as a short play entitled Still Life and became an iconic film, starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, which was quickly recognised as an enduring, three-hanky weepy. Emma Rice reworked it for Cornish theatre innovators Kneehigh and it opened in 2008 in a London cinema, a nod to…
ANNA Leonowens’ memoirs, on which Margaret Landon based her 1944 best-selling novel Anna and the King of Siam, were rather selective when it came to accuracy in telling the facts about her life, to say the least. Landon’s romantic view of Leonowens’ stay at the Siamese court as a teacher to King Munkut’s many children…
LAURA Wade’s play Home, I’m Darling hit the London stage with a 50s flurry and a 22- carat central performance by Katherine Parkinson. Now it has been made available for amateur performance and Frome Drama is the first company to take it on, after its sell-out London run and two national tours, including a visit…
IT’s easy to imagine that the cult of celebrity is a phenomenon of the 21st century, but paparazzi have been chasing stars and venue owners have been encouraging big names – notorious or famous – for at least a century. Cole Porter’s glorious, frothy musical, Anything Goes, set on a transatlantic liner in the great…
STEPHEN King’s 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption has made an interesting journey from its origins among the other short stories in Different Seasons via a cult movie to the stage. Like so many other dramas it is set in a prison, this one “the Shank” in Maine, where lifers expected to be…
LOSS and death hang over Philip Goulding’s play – Margaret Harvey lost her trawlerman husband about 30 years ago and has ever hardly left their run-down fishing community. Now her feisty social worker daughter, Rebecca, is about to move out to live with her poet boyfriend, Pete. It is just one more loss in a one-dimensional…
THOSE who love to place people in little boxes and categorise them would have difficulty in pinning a label on Dave Gorman. For two stints of 75 minuets, either side of a short interval, he kept a capacity audience informed and entertained. It would be inaccurate to describe him as a stand-up comic, and although…
THE way in which the interwoven stories of a World War II romance and marriage, through a next generation firmly embedded in the mystique of that period and on to the present day, and a granddaughter struggling to break away from the stiflingly-traditional life imposed by her father, is reminiscent of William Burroughs’ style in…
ORIGINALLY written as a sharp contrast to the sugar-sweet optimistic teenage comedies of the 1980s, this cynical black comedy that looks at the dark side of American college life, bullying, teenage suicide, sexual assault and school violence, has gathered momentum and a cult following as it has progressed from the written page to film and…