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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
LEWIS Carroll’s story of Alice in Wonderland is intended to subvert your expectations, but when our heroine stumbles into Blunderland instead, there are even more twists and turns on the way down the rabbit hole. A packed audience at Mere had a second chance to enjoy Eric Kincaid and Chris Wood’s version of the famous…
THE big Christmas 2024 puzzler in the Cotswolds is whether 3 is less than 6, just like 6, or greater than 6? And if you have already been to Cirencester’s Barn Theatre this festive season, you may well have the answer. If not, I strongly suggest you get your tickets for The Three Musketeers –…
WHEN the First World War ended, it was sometimes called the Great War but, in the aftermath of carnage that looked senseless even at the time to many participants, there was a hope that it would be the War To End All Wars. That worked well, didn’t it? As we hover on the precipice of…
BRISTOL has always been a special place for Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ever-popular tale of piracy and treasure maps … it’s even said the Scottish writer worked on the story at the city’s Llandoger Trow inn, which might have been the model for the Admiral Benbow. This year, Bristol Old Vic Theatre School has…