Sons of Town Hall
Broadwindsor & Langton Matravers
FOR fans of Simon and Garfunkel, Tom Waits, and Monty Python, the theatrical-folk duo Sons of Town Hall offer an exciting and inspiring musical adventure, coming to Broadwindsor’s Comrades Hall, on Friday 23rd May, and the village hall at Langton Matravers on Saturday 24th, both at 7.30pm.
The show is more than a concert—it’s an immersive experience unlike any other. American songwriter/author David Berkeley and British songwriter/producer Ben Parker are the men beneath the hats in this transatlantic folk duo, creating an entirely new performance genre. Part live concept album, part performance art, the pair conjures their timeless mythic universe under the aliases Josiah Chester Jones and George Ulysses Brown, 19th-century vagabonds who travel the world in a hand-built boat to escape troubled pasts and search for adventure and love.
Bloody women and other myths
Bridport
MEDEA, betrayed by her husband for a younger woman (sound familiar?) but also vengeful child murderer, is one of the great tragic/horror figures of Greek myth and drama—now reinvented by clown April Rose Small for a new look at the tragic story of women through history in Bloody Medea!, coming to Bridport Arts Centre on Friday 16th May.
This one-woman show is wild, bold and deeply human, as April tackles the injustices faced by women throughout history—including her own.
She reimagines the tragedy of Medea through comedy, song and dance. Expect the nuttiest, weirdest and funniest moments, as Medea’s pure love explodes into chaotic hilarity and heart breaking tragedy. It’s a show that will make you laugh until you cry, then weep until you laugh. Medea is the original femme fatale, Euripedes’ sorceress-seducer, Jason’s golden goose.
Unravelling steampunk
Honiton
CONCERTS on consecutive days at Honiton’s Beehive Centre will take the audience on journeys into Americana and folk-rock with The Unravelling Wilburys, and the Jules Verne and Willy Wonka-inflected world of steampunk with the Steampunk Orchestra.
The Unravelling Wilburys, a clever and hugely enjoyable tribute to the original Wilburys—a super-group that included Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne—are at Honiton on Friday 2nd May.
The show features the best of the Wilbury albums (Handle with Care, The End of the Line, The Devil’s Been Busy, Tweeter and The Monkey Man) as well as Only the Lonely, Won’t Back Down, While my Guitar Gently Weeps, Like a Rollin’ Stone, Mr Blue Sky—as well as the kind of comedy only a band spending too many nights in Travelodges could dream up.
On the following night, Saturday 3rd, you are invited to step into a very different world where classical elegance meets the energy of rock, indie, and pop. The Steampunk Orchestra is an experience that blends musical genres and eras with a unique steampunk flair.
Get ready to be transported into a realm of gears, gadgets, top hats, feathers and bustiers and unforgettable melodies from five decades of iconic music, all bathed in the warm glow of vintage Edison bulbs.
Spring concert
Axminster
AXE Vale Orchestra has a spring classical concert at the Minster in Axminster on Sunday 18th May, at 3.30pm.
Conducted by Walter Brewster, the orchestra, led by Jane Bultz, will play Moxart’s Impresario overture, Beethoven’s Symphony No 2, and the incidental music from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
For more information or tickets, visit www.axevaleorchestra.co.uk.
In for a Duck?
Dorchester
CRICKET is by its very nature a rather theatrical sport, full of traditions, big characters and a certain almost nostalgic glamour, and Two Mapgies Theatre Company have taken it onto the stage with Duck, a play by maatin, coming to Dorchester Arts at the Corn Exchange on Friday 2nd May at 7.30pm.
It’s the summer of 2005, as England prepares to win the Ashes … Ismail (Smiley to his friends), a British Indian schoolboy, is about to become the youngest-ever player in his elite public school’s First XI cricket team.
He sets his sights on immortality, breaking the school batting record and getting his name into Wisden—but things are about to heat up.
Duck is a play about adolescence, the pressures of sporting competition and finding your identity in an environment that doesn’t cater for difference. The production features creative captioning—performances are captioned with projected text and illustrations onto the set.
Help! Fairytales in danger!
Honiton and Exeter
FAIRYTALES, Fables and Other Assorted Nonsense is an original, imaginative and colourful new show for all the family from Assembleth Theatre, with two dates in Devon, at Exeter’s Phoenix arts centre on Thursday 29th May at 7pm and Honiton Beehive Centre on Friday 30th at 3pm.
Across the land, fairytales live in fear … fear for their lives, fear for their freedom and, most importantly, fear for their turnips. Why you ask? Because Little Red Riding Hood has taken control. The once sweet and innocent girl now rules The Breadcrumb Forest with an iron fist and a mob of incompetent wolves.
The fairy tales of the forest needs someone brave, someone bold, and someone daring to free them from this oppression. Unfortunately for them, they’ve only got Susan. Faced with tax-collecting, big bad wolves, bears who’ve had too much porridge and smorgasbords of poisoned fruit, Susan must try desperately to find a way to help the forest. If she starts a revolution along the way, well that can’t hurt anyone can it?
Join Susan as she traverses this magical land to help aid all your favourite fairy tale characters, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Three Little Pigs, Cinderella and more as they aim to keep the literal wolves from the door. Ridiculous mishaps, outlandish love stories and a barnyard full of animals that won’t stop talking await in this riotous, rebellious comedy.
Imaginary beings and magical music
Shute and Lyme Regis
THE year-round programme of Shute Festival events has two dates in May, travel writer Nicholas Jubber exploring our fascination with monsters, on 7th May, and the Kilima Piano Trio at St Michael’s Church on Sunday 18th.
Nicholas Jubber will be talking at Peak Chapel, in Pound St, Lyme Regis, from 7pm, looking at the age-old interest in monsters, from the granite cliffs of Cornwall to the mountain shrines of Japan. How have these imaginary beings affected humanity over the ages. Booking is essential for this event.
The Kilima Trio have a delightful programme for their afternoon concert at 4pm. They open with Mozart’s Piano Trio in C, followed by Faure’s Trio Op 120k, Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile from the 1st String Quartet, and ending with Clara Schumann’s Piano trio Op 17.
Barb Jungr, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen
Bridport & Taunton
ONE of the world’s greatest cabaret singers and a brilliant song arranger, Barb Jungr comes to Taunton Brewhouse on Thursday 8th May, and Bridport’s Electric Palace on Saturday 10th, with Hallelujah on Desolation Row, a celebration of the songs of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
This show features her best and award-winning interpretations of songs by two of the greatest contemporary songwriters, with a selection of challenging new arrangements of these classic songbooks.
Barb Jungr’s formidable talent as a singer, composer and lyricist is matched by her ability to reinterpret familiar songs and reveal new depths of meaning and beauty.
A Puccini favourite
Exeter
DEVON Opera’s young singers will tackle one of the most popular—and vocally demanding—operas for their spring production—Puccini’s La Boheme, which will be staged at the Barnfield Theatre, Exeter, on !5th and 16th May.
It is so well-known that it is easy to overlook just how vocally and emotionally demanding their beautiful tragic opera is, with its story of poverty-stricken Bohemians in late 19th century Paris.
The soloists are Oksana Lepska as Mimi, Martins Smaukstelis as Rodolfo, Catherine Hooper as Musetta and Sam Young as Marcello.
The opera is directed by Anna Gregory, the artistic director of Devon Opera, who is a well-known singer in her own right.
Celebrating dance
Bridport
BRIDPORT Dance Festival, a new festival in the town’s calendar, on the weekend of 23rd-24th May, is a celebration of dance in all its forms, with opportunities for local dancers and visiting professionals.
Dance Jam and Cypher, on Friday at 7pm, will see more than 20 dancers taking to the centre of a circle to dance for three minutes, improvising movements to different pieces of music. The audience will stand around the circle in this performance which originates in hip hop.
On Saturday 24th, at 2pm, the Aakash Odedra Company will perform Little Murmur, a show which explores choreographer-dancer Aakash Odedra’s own story of being diagnosed with dyslexia as a young child.
He spelt his name wrongly until he was 21 and it wasn’t until he “found the missing A” that he felt he belonged. Defined by his learning difficulties, not his abilities, dance became his mode of expression.
Also on Saturday, at 7.30pm at the Electric Palace, there will be a performance of dance and film, reflecting and celebrating the individuality of the dancers. It will feature solos by guest artist Nafisah Baba, who won the BBC Young Dancer of the Year 2017 and later danced with Phoenix Dance Theatre.
The play’s the thing
Dorchester
Dorchester Arts has a busy programme of drama in May, beginning with Our Star Theatre, on tour with another comic reinvention of John Buchan’s secret agent Richard Hannay, Hannay Stands Fast, on Friday 9th May.
A thrilling sequel to The 39 Steps, the new play sees our dashing hero on a mission to thwart a new and deadly threat to his beloved England. Engaged on this top-secret case by MI5, Hannay makes his way down to Cornwall to infiltrate a secretive organisation and learn their dastardly plans.
From Wednesday 15th to Friday 16th May, the Somerleigh Players are staging Time Firth’s Sheila’s Island. Laugh (and sympathise) with Sheila, Julie, Denise and Fay, on a supposedly enjoyable adventure, who find themselves marooned on an island in the Lake District. They have to fend for themselves, manufacturing weapons from items found in Julie’s bottomless rucksack, playing French cricket with very different rules and facing disappointment when the rescue call fails. Truths are told and dirty washing aired in the gloomy foggy weather, in this black comedy.
The role of Hamlet is one of the biggest in all theatres so a solo version sounds like a challenge … but The Play’s The Thing, as The One-Person Hamlet comes to Dorchester Corn Exchange on Sunday 18th May. In this critically acclaimed 90-minute staging, directed by Fiona Laird, actor Mark Lockyer explores Hamlet’s inner demons. We see the prince, powerless against a tide of selfishness and injustice, losing his grip on reality. But if he really is mad, then is this story a figment of his broken imagination, and the other characters merely voices in his head? This powerful play is also at Poole’s Lighthouse Arts Centre on Friday 16th May.
- Hannay Stands Fast is also at The Mowlem, Swanage on Thursday 8th May, Sidmouth Manor Pavilion on Saturday 24th, and The Flavel, Dartmouth on Wednesday 28th.
Award-winning trio on tour
Concerts in the West
A TRIO of harp, viola and flute players, who met at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama nearly 20 years ago, come to Dorset and Somerset on Friday 9th and Saturday 10th May, for a series with Concerts in the West, at Bridport, Ilminster and Crewkerne.
Trio Anima are Rosalind Ventris, viola, Anneke Hodnett, harp, and Matthew Featherstone, flute. They have been playing together since 2006, and have delighted audiences in concert halls and at festivals with their distinctive instrumental combination and imaginative programming.
The trio won the Elias Fawcett Award for Outstanding Chamber Ensemble at the 2012 Royal Overseas League Competition & First Prize at the Camac Harps Chamber Ensemble Competition in 2007. They have been Live Music Now Artists and were awarded a Chamber Music Fellowship at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2011. In 2017 they were selected as Kirckman Concert Society Artists.
The programme for their tour includes works by Arnold Bax, Sally Beamish, Faure, Piazzolla, Debussy, Dowland and Nathan James Dearden.
They are at Bridport Arts Centre on Friday 9th May at 11.30am, Ilminster Arts Centre that evening at 7.30pm and at Crewkerne Dance House on Saturday at 7.30pm.
Favourite choral work
Bridport
CARL Orff’s Carmina Burana, a theatrical, dramatic cantata that is one of the world’s best-loved choral works, is the spring choice for the West Dorset Singers’ concert on Saturday 17th May at St Swithun’s Church, Bridport.
Much-used in television scores or as music with advertisements—do your remember the Old Spice advert with the surfer, or the music played for the entrance of the X Factor judges?—O Fortuna is the famous opening verse of Carmina Burana, in which ORFF drew on medieval poems about life’s earthier pleasures—the fickleness of Fate, the joys of Spring and especially what a young man’s fancy turns to.
There are maidens who wish they weren’t, young men eager for the pleasures of the flesh, drunken gamblers led astray by an Abbot, a roasted swan, followed by a hangover and realisation that Fate will get you in the end. It sounds like a good Saturday night out in Bridport!
First performed in Germany in 1937 to great acclaim, Carmina Burana has become a 20th-century classic.
West Dorset Singers are joined by a choir of local children, professional soloists, two pianos and a percussion band for the concert on 17th May at St Swithun’s Church, at 7pm. Tickets are available from the Bridport Music Centre in South St and from www.ticketsource.co.uk/wds.
Beaminster Festival
Beaminster
The brilliant Three Inch Fools kick off the Beaminster Festival performing their high octane, musically driven hilarious The Most Perilous Comedie of Elizabeth I, set in the magnificent gardens of Beaminster Manor on Tuesday June 3rd at 3 pm—picnics from 1.30pm.
Highlights of the Festival are an Art Exhibition in the Public Hall during the week of the Festival; Secret Galleries and Gardens in aid of the Prout Bridge Project; music ranging from The Fairey Brass Band to Guy Johnston, cello, from Steve Knightley to Jacky Zhang, piano, BBC Young Musician finalist. Add to that five fascinating literary events and you have a veritable feast of culture set in one of the most charming little towns in West Dorset.
Main events 28 June-6 July. Pick up a brochure or visit www.beaminsterfestival.com.
GPW
