One of Disney's most beloved and iconic musicals returns to the stage, and is now in its final week at Birmingham's Hippodrome theatre. Is this 'tale as old as time' one worth being a guest for?
There’s something innately quite bookish about Dan Brown’s chart-storming mystery thriller The Da Vinci Code, mish-mashing as it does an at-times bonkers bricolage of history, religious iconography, conspiracy theory and a hefty dose of riddles and wordplay. Sure, it tiptoes into fairly rote Brown territory of shadowy operations, double-crosses and globetrotting, but it is principally a fairly cerebral affair.
We attempt to escape from a Japanese Warlord in one of several offerings at Escape Hunt, Birmingham. Razor-sharp half-term fun, or hour-long futile frustration?
Comically dressed as Boris Johnson, impressionist Aaron James struts across the Grand’s slightly-canted boards, promising the audience he’s “going to fix this mess”. He’s talking, it transpires, about his hair.
Last year, when reviewing Melton Mowbray’s fantastic Xtreme Scream Park, I posited the biggest question facing its return visitors would be ones of comparison; namely, ‘is it as good this year?’.
I would like, if I may, to take you on a not-so-strange journey…
What worked most effectively about William Friedkin’s 1973 screen adaptation of William Peter Batty’s The Exorcist was its simplicity and immediacy.
Screamfest - the annual Halloween scare park offering from The National Forest Adventure Farm at Burton-on-Trent - is the longest-running event in my ‘Halloween Horror Visits’ series.
One of the first things you are greeted with in 9 to 5 the Musical is - fittingly - an enormous, glittering effigy of the show’s now-iconic title, followed shortly by a recorded video appearance from the grand dame of Country herself.
THERE'S a topical undercurrent that courses through Dennis Kelly’s After The End that seems to somehow become only more prescient with each passing year. Debuting in 2005, it’s true that the spectres of the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq and post-9/11 neuroses can be felt in much of the socio-political commentary and debate littered throughout this claustrophobic piece, centring as it does around two young friends taking refuge in a fallout shelter after a nuclear attack.
