Monthly Archives: August 2016

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Allegro premiered in 1947 and got a mixed press. Broadway audiences, who had just seen Oklahoma! and Carousel, were very disappointed. Today there are going to be a lot of musical buffs and Rodgers … Continue reading →

For many readers stories about schoolgirls will bring back happy memories of Enid Blyton, Angela Brazil, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and perhaps, Mary O’Malley’s Once A Catholic. When I think of schoolgirls, I think of Ronald … Continue reading →

This small-scale American musical is set in a coal mining community in West Virginia in 1962. The story is by Mariana Elder. A teenager is shocked to learn that the mine in which his father lost his life ten years … Continue reading →

The Young Vic is well-known for its radical approach to the classics. Australian director Simon Stone’s truly remarkable re-working of Lorca’s Yerma is so radical that nothing is left but the title and the terrible agonies of not being able … Continue reading →

Sean O’Casey’s masterpiece, is a slice of Dublin tenement life during the Troubles and leading up to the Easter Uprising in 1916. The Abbey Theatre audiences on the fourth night of its original run in 1926 did not take kindly … Continue reading →

Jonathan Kent directs a season of plays by Anton Chekhov. You can see Platanov, Ivanov and The Seagull separately or all three on the same day. I enjoyed them so much when they were at Chichester Festival last year that … Continue reading →

In the Victorian era, the heyday for popular theatre, audiences loved melodrama, spectacle and sensational scenes. ”Sensation is what the public wants and you can’t give them too much of it,” said the highly successful actor, playwright and theatre manager … Continue reading →

For film buffs, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly are synonymous; but Truman Capote, who wrote the novella on which the 1966 movie was based, loathed her performance, thinking her violently psychologically miscast. He had wanted Marilyn … Continue reading →