THERE has never been a time when the National Health has had a higher profile than during the pandemic. Throughout 2020 it was impossible to miss posters, petitions, news stories, government statements and support demonstrations for the service set up in 1948 by a hopeful and pioneering Labour administration. Before long opposition had evaporated and…
IF you mix the hilarious Mischief Theatre and Las Vegas superstar magicians Penn and Teller, you ought to have a recipe for amazing magical mayhem. Certainly many in the packed Theatre Royal audience loved Magic Goes Wrong and laughed a lot. Perhaps it helps to be a fan of magic – there are several big…
WHEN Bing Crosby sang White Christmas for the first time on Radio during his 1941 NBC Radio show, he may have thought it was a good number, but I doubt that he would have imagined that his recording of the song would become an all-time best-selling single of 50,000,000 copies, and if you take other…
ON the 24th of September 1930 London’s glitterati gathered for the opening of a new Theatre, the Phoenix. It was a night when champagne corks popped and everything sparkled, including the first production Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Despite critic Ivor Brown writing ‘ Within a few years, the student of drama will be sitting in…
WHEN the curtain rose showing a white gauze curtain which in turn rose to reveal a completely bare white set dominated by a two-storey, futuristic house mounted on a revolve, my companion – and many others in the audience – exclaimed “Wow!” When the chorus entered, again clad in white, in contrast to the two…
THERE’S nothing predictable about Emma Rice’s productions other than their unpredictability, but for those of us in the South West who saw her development first hand with Kneehigh, before she went national and divided audiences and administrators at Shakespeare’s Globe, her take on Wuthering Heights was bound to be an exciting prospect. The co-production between…
THE Classic Thrills Company tour of The Cat and the Canary is a large scale production, filling the stage with big furniture and sets – a taste of things to come at Yeovil Octagon, which closes next year for a major refurbishment. John Willard’s original, which has spawned numerous film and theatre adaptation, gets a…
WHEN a documentary entitled Drag Queen at 16 was shown on BBC Three as part of their season about young people with amazing stories to tell, few thought that a 16-year-old who wanted to attend his school Prom dressed in drag, would provide the seeds for a successful stage musical and film. That is not…
AGAINST a background of doom and gloom, it’s hardly surprising that theatregoers are champing at the bit for a chance to return to venues as audiences watching their favourites, friends and families on stage again. It would be difficult to imagine a more perfect play than Philp Goulding’s version of the famous film The Titfield…
IN the classic David Lean film adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, several storylines, important in the books, have virtually been edited out in order to make the narrative flow more smoothly and quickly. Watching this, Shaun McKenna’s fifth stage adaptation of a Peter James novel, that there were just too many…