FACED with the option of facing an audience at 11am on a Monday morning, or 7.30pm, Tuesday evening, I know which one I would choose. Like true professionals, the hour of 11am and the coolness of the Assembly Rooms did not phase Rachel Podger and Christopher Glynn for a moment. With their musical skills and…
ALAN Ayckbourn’s 1980 play Season’s Greetings is perhaps the polar opposite of all those sickly, soft-focus images of the perfect family festivities. Set in the home of Neville and Belinda Bunker, the five scenes start on Christmas Eve and end in the early hours of 27th December, and show how the family and friends slot…
THE fact that the Mozart Fest has returned to Bath after the trials and tribulations and uncertainties of the past year or so is a triumph in itself. Chairman Sir David Bell and his fellow directors had to take a tremendous amount on trust, right down to printing programmes for a Fest which at the…
UNIVERSITY students have had a massively challenging, and disappointing, time during the pandemic lockdowns and cancellations, segregated from the majority of their friends, colleagues and teachers and learning for all-important exams by Zoom meetings and virtual lessons. So it’s all the more impressive that the BA(Hons) students at AUB have re-emerged into the public spotlight…
MUCH-loved television shows like Blackadder and Dad’s Army have become a staple of the local amateur stage in recent years and now we can add The Vicar of Dibley to the list, thanks to an effervescent production by Street Theatre. It’s easy to see why these classic television comedies are so popular, both for performers…
FOR most of the time in which it was responsible for issuing a certificate for a film to be shown to the public, The British Board of Film Censors would, after seeing the film, place it in one of three categories, U, which could be seen by anyone regardless of age unaccompanied, A, which anyone…
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…