Fame: Starmaker hits the spot

Fame Starmaker 2010 production poster

Have just returned home from seeing Starmaker Theatre Company‘s production of Fame at the Wilde Theatre in Bracknell. It was really good to see a decent audience there and they were rewarded with an excellent performance by a fine cast, most of them under 18 years of age. Starmaker has apparently

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Sister Act - better than the film?

We went to see Sister Act at the London Palladium on a trip organised by Sainsbury Singers on 6 October. I had heard that it was quite different to the film and so it proved.

It was hard to fault the show. The first couple of numbers in the nightclub seemed a bit ordinary. But then things took off with the appearance of the nuns and the evening roared through.

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Billy Elliot hits the mark

Theatre adaptions of films don’t always work well but Billy Elliot is a notable exception to that rule.

We saw this show for the first time on Saturday and the matinee performance held our party of eight fully in its grip from beginning to end. Indeed one of our number was in pieces after the finale to Act 1 where Billy dances with great anger in a dream scene against an ensemble of riot shield-wielding policemen; never has the timeout of an interval been so well placed since Les Miserables‘ One Day More.

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Please turn the Sound of Music up

Have just been to the Sound of Music and must admit to being a bit puzzled about the experience and my reaction to it, until I read a blog from Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph.

He was there the night after us and convinced me I wasn’t being overly picky by puzzling over Summer Strallen’s barely luke

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