THE Extraordinary Bodies production of Hattie Naylor and Jamie Beddard’s new musical circus play Waldo’s Circus of Magic & Terror has opened in Bristol, presenting its shocked, moved and wildly enthusiastic audience with a sensational and memorable spectacle – and enough food for thought for the rest of 2023. The title might have hints of…
IF is show had been a race horse competing at Cheltenham’s National Hunt Festival last week, a form book might well has described it as being a relentless galloper. From flag fall to a rousing set of encores, Roddy Doyle’s stage version of his 1987 novel and 1991 film The Commitments, is relentless as it…
IAN Hislop and Nick Newman describe their play A Bunch of Amateurs as a celebration of the Am Dram genre and all who take part in it, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in Sheila Martin’s production for Street Theatre, on stage in Street until 18th March. The story (of a threatened Suffolk company…
WHEN it comes to whodunnits, Agatha Christie’s The Hollow is a real classic, an old warhorse of a play with an archetypal country weekend party setting, aristocratic family with poor relations, faithful old retainers and chippy young staff and a victim who pretty much gets what’s coming to … It is quite dated, rather sexist,…
A DAMP Sunday afternoon in Weston-Super-Mare is hardly the ideal time and place to whip up an audience reaction to an entertainment that stems from that most iconic of passionate dances, The Tango. That was the daunting task facing Strictly Come Dancing regular of seven series Vincent Simone and his company of dancers, plus one…
IT’S a bit of a drive (65 miles there and back) to Bath, and, facing dire warnings of blizzards and tarmac ice rinks, the lure of the Elevate Festival offerings had to be honed down to one event in the 15 days of pop-up performances. If Frome-based Really Truly Theatre Company’s Lockdown Blues was anything…
THE critic Lionel Hale once described the legendarily risqué comedian Max Miller’s act as being full of ‘honest vulgarity’. It is a phrase that can be used to describe this production which makes no apologies for lurching happily from big, bold, flashy numbers, performed in uninhibited style by soloists and ensemble alike, to gentle oversentimental…
JOEL Horwood’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane thrilled audiences and critics when it opened at the National Theatre in London just before the pandemic hit, and after a West End transfer is now on a UK tour until early October, returning to the south and west…
YOU Bury Me, recently seen at Bristol Old Vic, was joint winner of the inaugural Women’s Prize for Playwriting in 2020, a prize Tunisian-born novelist and poet Ahlam shared with Amy Trigg. The daughter of a political activist forced into exile from his Algerian home, before returning to hold high office in the newly-formed government,…
TWELFTH Night, a story of love, mistaken identity, revenge, gender swapping and more love, is widely recognised as entry-level Shakespeare. So how do you make it relevant to today’s concerns about equal opportunities, self-selection of pronouns and celebrity culture? At Arts University Bournemouth, guest director Aileen Gonsalves found the perfect solution, a brilliantly-conceived mashup of…