A new adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby will start Derby Theatre’s 50th anniversary season. Produced in partnership with Scotland’s Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the production will feature live music and will be set against the glamorous backdrop of the jazz age in 1922. The Great Gatsby will be on stage from Friday 3 until Saturday… Continue reading Derby Theatre to celebrate 50th anniversary
Author: Editor
Three new shows amplified in Nottingham
Three new, female-led shows by emerging Midlands writers will be unveiled at Nottingham Playhouse’s Amplify Seasons: Summer event. Frenemies, a double bill of work in progress, will start the event. It will comprise Spare Goose by Danica Corns of Smashed Avocado Productions, created as part of the Nottingham Playhouse writers’ group in 2024, and F*ck… Continue reading Three new shows amplified in Nottingham
Picture You Dead
Peter James is one of the world’s most successful thriller writers. His fictional character Roy Grace, the lead character of his police procedural novels which all contain the word “dead” in their title, is reported to be Queen Camilla’s favourite detective. Over the past decade, James’s novels have been turned into stage plays. They are… Continue reading Picture You Dead
The Glass Menagerie
The Yard Theatre finishes its fourteen-year existence in its existing building with a stylistically adventurous production of Tennessee Williams’s memory play The Glass Menagerie. Tom (Tom Varey), standing to one side of the stage, tells us he is taking us back to “the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school… Continue reading The Glass Menagerie
Derby’s Cinderella up for two panto awards
Derby LIVE and Little Wolf Entertainment’s 2024 panto Cinderella has been nominated in two categories at the UK Pantomime Association’s annual awards. Mina Anwar, who played the Fairy Godmother, is up for the Carmen Silvera award for best magical being, while Morgan Brind and Roddy Peters are nominated as best sisters. Cinderella was Derby’s highest-grossing panto as well… Continue reading Derby’s Cinderella up for two panto awards
The Testament of Gideon Mack
In the midst of preparing for the inevitable exclusion from the list of multi-year funded organisations, Dogstar have found themselves producing a text that similarly has suffered a cull, as The Testament of Gideon Mack from next year onwards will no longer be part of the National 5 English curriculum. Taking the opportunity to tour… Continue reading The Testament of Gideon Mack
What Dreams May Come
A humanoid figure with a donkey’s head lies on a hospital bed in a small, clean room. A book of Shakespeare sonnets lies on his chest. As the dawn rises, we see this elderly man’s day begin: nurses and doctors come to check on him, offering food and assessing his condition. Family members visit, bringing… Continue reading What Dreams May Come
Il Bajazet
The photographs displayed above are so different that readers may wonder if they really can belong to the same production. And they would not be far wrong. Although Il Bajazet carries the name of Vivaldi on the sleeve, it is the work of many hands, what in 1735 Verona was known as a pasticcio, to you and me… Continue reading Il Bajazet
Mid Life
A show about mid-life women by a mid-life woman and based on anthropologist Dr Isabel de Salis’s research into 50 menopausal women for over 10 years, Mid Life is poignant, funny, over-reaching and frustrating by turns. There is a lot packed into just 90 uninterrupted minutes, from the physical and mental effects of perimenopause and menopause, to… Continue reading Mid Life
One Day When We Were Young
This revival of Nick Payne’s intimate two-hander packs a lot into ninety minutes: six decades in fact, beginning in 1942 when young lovers Leonard and Violet give their families invented explanations for not coming home and book into a Bath hotel for a night together, their first and their last before Leonard goes off to… Continue reading One Day When We Were Young