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…
THE enlightened populace of the 21st century can hardly get its head around the idea that, not too long ago, our ancestors regarded human beings as property to be insured, and compensated for, just as any other commodity. If we look not too deeply into it, there are STILL some landed gentry living off the…
THE song lyric ‘Never, never trust a woman, You’ll be sorry if you do, For man was made out of a monkey, And a Dame will make a monkey out of you’, came to mind as this play closed with Max, Keith Allen’s bullying patriarch, suddenly realising that it was his apparently credulous daughter-in law-Ruth,…
WHILE Janacek’s Jenufa and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, the companions to Mozart’s Don Giovanni on the Welsh National Opera’s spring tour, leave the impression that they are yet to reach their full potential, the blend of singers, musicians, and designers in Mozart’s magnificent opera seem as well blended as cordon bleu omelette. Baritone Aaron O’Hare, suave…