Reviews

Forbidden Broadway is a cabaret show which pokes fun at the Broadway genre by changing the words of well-known numbers. I fondly remember a professional production a couple of decades ago and haven’t caught another one since.

So I was really looking forward to this production, and I wasn’t disappointed. Though not at the standard of the professionals I’d seen previously, there was an enthusiasm and sense of fun that was contagious.

This sumptuous production of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play is no mere ‘revival’.  With sixteen actors, six singers and twenty musicians of the Southbank Sinfonia mixing it with the action, director Michael Longhurst makes the play a sprawling Singspiel spectacle.

The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society has reached opening night of its first significant production, The Murder at Haversham Manor, with a debut director proud to be at the helm of the society’s first play featuring such a cast.  But trouble is evident even before the lights go down.  (It’s worth being in the theatre early to see that.)

As I left the Bakery@1812 last night, I was surrounded by the silent wiping of tears from eyes and softly felt sniffles as the entire house was physically and emotionally moved from the performance they just witnessed.

Peta Brady’s poignant play Strands is about two sisters exasperatingly living in their own world, whilst also living and loving for each other. Sisterly love and frustration, stories within truths, and the strands that bind a family together help create this short but compassionate play.