TIM Firth’s play Sheila’s Island – a sort of gender-swapped version of his 1992 Neville’s Island – is touring the UK in a production by Joanna Read. When it opened at Bath Theatre Royal on 11th May, one of its four actors, Abigail Thaw, was indisposed, and the remarkable Tracy Collier got the chance to…
THERE are so many things to admire in the Leeds Playhouse’s production of CS Lewis’s classic children’s book, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Staging, lighting and sound teams combine to make it a visual treat, and the way in which the cast combine their skills as musicians, providing a continual stream of appropriate…
IT was good to see that BODS were not frightened to put their full name, Bath Operatic and Dramatic Society, at the head of the central page of their informative programme for Crazy for You. Some groups nowadays will bend over backwards to try and ensure that the audience does not realise that the production…
LONG before the line ‘No Sir this is the West, when the legend becomes fact print the legend’, was spoken in John Ford’s 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, the Americans had begun the habit of glorifying dubious characters in their past history. Men like the multi-murderer William H Bonney, alias Billy the…
WHEN Mark Bell took on the challenge of directing The Play that Goes Wrong, he opted for out- and-out farce dominated by mimed comedy, and as was seen last week in Bath in the new reworking of his original production, it is a formula that works a treat. Faced with transferring a 1985 film version…
“SURPRISE, surprise” is the cry that in many a story goes up as our hero opens the door to find a room full of friends waiting to give them a surprise party. So far no one has thrown a surprise party for me, but under director Sean Turner’s clever reworking of Mark Bell’s original, this…
IT’s hard to believe that an early reviewer described Franz Lehar’s sparkling operetta The Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) as “distasteful.” To us, it is the epitome of Viennese music – tuneful, timeless, frivolous and the epitome of a careless era before the horrors which would break over Europe in the 20th century. There is…
POPULAR music tastes have always been a movable feast. Ragtime took over from Music Hall, and then was replaced by Jazz, which in turn lost out to Big Band and Swing, which reigned until Rock ‘n’ Roll arrived in the swinging sixties. The 1970s and 80s saw the rock bands kings of the genre, and…
WHEN Private Tommo Peaceful asks where is the young woman he has been visiting on leave from the trenches, the reply is: “In the cemetery. Damn the Germans, damn the French and damn you for fighting your war over my land!” The exchange comes part way through the play, almost as an aside. Those words…
IN the early 1970s as I was leaving the Bristol Hippodrome after watching a third-rate production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, redeemed only by the performance of Marion Montgomery in the role of Reno Sweeney, I thought what a pity that such a fine show should receive such a poor presentation. Since that date there…