Culture Bound – December

It’s déjà vu time and unless you happen to be a theatre venue on the Scilly Isles (Q: Is there one?) then I’m afraid it will be doors locked and bolted for the foreseeable future. What with a new strain of the virus, constant tier changes and now flip flopping about who gets the vaccines and when, I guess there are several bigger fish to fry but the theatre industry must be in imminent danger of collapsing completely, at least financially. Of course, this all happened in Shakespeare’s time and more than once (as an aside if you missed the Christmas edition of Upstart Crow search it out on the BBC iPlayer and give yourself a treat). Even so the drama survived, so let’s be positive.

In the meantime there are numerous venues, companies, actors, directors and creatives who are still keeping the theatrical flag flying online and I’ve saluted some of these in my 20 For 2020 round up of the year.

Here’s the current overall blog stats

Continuous number of days reviewing online = 277          Online shows reviewed = 339

Most popular page = Online Theatre listings – accessed 2,800 times (with 2,300 downloads)

And now – the summary for December 2020

In the circumstances it seems inappropriate to offer star ratings for theatre productions as the same criteria simply cannot apply. However – all shows received a full review. Click on titles to access them.

Theatre

Haunting Julia	Alan Ayckbourn
Phèdre	Jean Racine adptd. by Ted Hughes
Breathe	Neil Bebber
Ruby	Neil Bebber
The Flying Lovers Of Vitebsk	Daniel Jamieson with songs by Ian Ross
42nd Street	Harry Warren & Al Dubin, Michael Stewart & Mark Bramble
Doing Whodunit	Michael Spicer
Show Boat	Jerome Kern & Oscar hammerstein
Petrichor	Devised by ThickSkin
Eternal	Glen Neath
Cyrano de Bergerac	Edmond Rostand (trans. Antony Burgess)
Doing The Pub Quiz	Michael Spicer
Peter Pan	Alan Pollock from the original by J.M. Barrie
Streaming Beauty	Sharp Teeth & Tom Marshman
Jack And The Beanstalk – The Garden Panto	Peter Duncan
Aladdin	Ben Crocker
A Christmas Carol	Olivia Race from the original by Charles Dickens
The Emperor’s New Clothes	Olivia Mace from the original by Hans Christian Andersen
Snow White In The Seven Months Of Lockdown	John Savournin and David Eaton
The Ministry Of Christmas	David Spicer
The Legend Of Moby Dick Whittington	Sleeping Trees
Kinky Boots	Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper
The Old House	Kate Maravan
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz	Garai Jones from the original by L. Frank Baum
The Railway Children	Mike Kenny from the original by E. Nesbit
Alice’s Adventures In  Wonderland	Chickenshed from the original by Lewis Carroll
Doing The Business	David Spicer
Dick Whittington	Jude Christian and Cariad Lloyd
War Horse	Nick Stafford from the original by Michael Morpurgo
Potted Panto	Daniel Clarkson, Jefferson Turner & Richard Hurst
Cinderella – A Comic Relief Pantomime For Christmas	The Dawson Brothers
Mischief Movie Night In	Mischief Theatre
Miss Saigon	Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg & Richard Maltby Jnr
Until The Flood	Dael Orlandersmith
The Haunting Of Alice Bowles	Philip Franks from an original by M.R.James

The rest of the year’s online theatre reviews can be accessed via the index here

 

Best Of The Bunch

War Horse

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