I FIRST got acquainted with the story of Waitress back in July 2007, at 20th Century Fox’s screening cinema in Soho. Later, the first copy of the film, on 35mm, was couriered down to Dorset on a motorcycle. Screen Bites, the food film festival we ran at the time, staged its first UK showing for…

THE idea of producing a satire on the birth of talking pictures bounced around Hollywood for years, with one or two modest versions being filmed, before it landed on MGM producer Arthur Freed’s desk in the early 1950s. After a few more twists and turns, Gene Kelly and choreographer Stanley Donen took up the challenge…

ONE of the most underestimated of Frank (Guys and Dolls) Loesser’s musicals, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, is rarely performed in this country, in spite of a fine score full of hummable solo and chorus numbers. The book was too strongly based in American business culture and humour to appeal to an…

THE name of the French fin de siecle comic dramatist Georges Feydeau is synonymous with bedroom farce – but, in the age of #MeToo and the constrictions of cancel culture, is there still a place for his fizzy confections of mistaken identities and thwarted illicit pleasures? That may be the inevitable response to a Feydeau…

WHEN Jim Cartwright’s play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice opened 30 years ago, the performances of Alison Steadman and Jane Horrocks took the critical breath away from the London reviewers. Its impact continues, and several revivals have delighted audiences around the country and the world. Now a new production, starring Shobna Gulati as…

1915. A group of wounded soldiers, French and English, arrive at a military field hospital in France. One of them has a copy of Henry V. They decide to pass their time by staging a Shakespearean play. The action moves back 500 years to the fields of France. Antic Disposition specialises in staging plays in…

ANDREW Lloyd Weber, composer of, amongst others, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, Cats and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Julian Fellowes, author of Downton Abbey and Aristocrats, are hardly the first names that would come to mind if you were looking for a composer and someone to adopt the script of a cult…

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…