Reviews

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bath Theatre Royal

PANTOMIME is all about familiarity – familiar stories, familiar routines, familiar songs, familiar faces … and Bath Theatre Royal has it in spades, plus the most beautiful theatre in the country. For many years, the theatre had one of panto’s great double acts – the much-missed Dame and writer, Chris Harris and his knockabout sidekick,…

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Robin Hood, The Egg, Theatre Royal Bath

THE story of Robin Hood, outlawed in Sherwood Forest and famous for robbing the rich to give to the poor, is the most obvious of all the traditional stories to politicise – it’s all there in the massive body of stories that first emerged in the poem Piers Plowman, written in around 1370. You might…

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A Vicar of Dibley Christmas – The Second Coming, Street Theatre

WHEN you’ve got a perfect cast performing a highly-acclaimed version of a couple of episodes of a favourite TV comedy, why not reprise the experience for some other episodes of the show. That was the welcome thinking behind Paul Townsend’s Christmas production at Strode Theatre in Street, getting the faithful audience into the festive spirit…

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Little Red, Bristol Old Vic Weston Studio

WHY is it that fairy tales are always described as timeless? It is just because they are just as relevant to every new generation of children, as Chippenham-born writer and actor Florence Espeut-Nickless discovered when she was preparing the Bristol Old Vic Weston Studio Christmas show, Little Red and Other Winter Tales. Florence, the “writer…

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The Little Mermaid, Bristol Old Vic

BRISTOL Old Vic’s 2024-25 Christmas show takes this famous story, gives it a contemporary environmental twist and creates something more beautiful, more powerful, more moving and more thoughtful than the original. It will also probably be the most inspiring Christmas show of the year – with a message that sings and swims throughout from the…

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Little Women, Studio Theatre, Salisbury

LOUISA May Alcott’s claim to a December slot on the theatrical calendar rests with the titular March girls’ yearnings for fine dresses and Christmas presents instead of the lives they are living in 1860s Massachusetts, while their newly-penurious father is off fighting in the four-year American Civil War. It was the perfect choice for Salisbury’s…

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The Murder Room, Civic Players at Yeovil Swan Theatre

THE prolific American writer Jack Sharkey first published The Murder Room in 1977, and now, almost 40 years on, Yeovil’s Civic Players have brought it to their avid audience. It should have happened back in 2020, but the pandemic got in the way, just weeks before the opening night. Thankfully, director Andrew Meadows and his…

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Sleeping Beauty, Salisbury Playhouse

BACK in 2018, Salisbury Playhouse came up with a national award-winning version of Beauty and the Beast, which remains in my memory as the finest new pantomime version of a favourite story ever – and I really have been to a few hundred pantos in my time – oh yes I have! Now, after all…

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The Pirates of Penzance, Sasha Regan Co at Bath Theatre Royal

THE latest manifestation of the Sasha Regan company’s hilariously entertaining all-male Pirates is in Bath this week, complete with its almost-all-new cast of daughters, policemen and gentlemen of the sea. The 17-strong company, along with the phenomenal Giannis Giannopoulos at the piano, bring out all of WS Gilbert’s satire and invention, with (as is traditional) a…

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Cinderella, Le Navet Bete at Exeter Northcott

CINDERELLA is the most popular of pantomimes, but this season the only professional production in the south west is at Exeter’s Northcott Theatre, where Le Navet Bete (that’s Daft Turnip in translation) has taken the story and shaken it up a bit, to the delight of children, parents, grandparents and other panto lovers. The three…

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