... A Slice Of Saturday Night Colchester MICHAEL PALIN once said of this Heather Brothers musical that it should be available on the National Health. Having enjoyed the Mercury Theatre's faultless and exuberant production I can only urge the Government to consider the proposal. The setting is the Club A Go-Go, circa 1964, a time when young men and women still regarded each other as alien species ...

... Crimson Lizard Leeds THE CRIMSON Lizard is not that old but it looks and sounds curiously dated, almost as if the audience is watching a revival of a vaguely remembered piece from the sixties. It has some enjoyable moments but is rather too predictable and is some times quite tedious. The central character is Croup, a psychiatric patient who adopts various outrageous disguises and in the final ...

... The Taming Of The Shrew Leeds SELDOM can an audience have laughed so much and for so long when watch ing a Shakespeare play. This interpretation of The Taming Of The shrew is supremely, gloriously funny and is without doubt a theatrical gem. Jude Kelly, the director, has chosen to set her Shrew on an ocean liner with characters clad in bizan-e but effective costumes Hortensio is dressed like ...

... Council pays up after strike threat A STRIKE hv backstage crew at the Kings Theatre, Edinburgh, which would have forced the can cellation of the Hogmanay per formance of the theatre's panto mime Jack and the Beanstalk, was narrowly averted last week when the district council blamed a com puter error for a shortfall in the technicians' overtime payments. But BETA shop steward at the Kings. ...

... BROADWAY Into The Woods INTO THE WOODS, the new Stephen Sondheim musical at Broadway's large Martin Beck Theatre, is as controversial as Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George. Less horrific than the first and less selfconsciously highbrow than the second, its ingenious mixture of a number of tairy stories maKes it a on more accessi ble and enjoyable for average theatre goers. Its ...

... SCARBOROUGH The Woman In Black A SKILFUL adaptation of the highly successsful thriller by Susan Hill, The Woman in Black, is a masterpiece and its world premiere at the Stephen Joseph Theatre must certainly be fol lowed by a presentation in the West End. Brilliantly adapted by Stephen Mal- latratt, who uses a clever series of theatrical devices to bring this haunting work to the stage, the ...

... COLISEUM Hansel and Gretel THE TIME is past for presenting Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel And Gretel with the sentimental fairytale value he put on it himself. David Poutney, in his new production for English National Opera, stops short of making it a study of child abuse but lets in a good measure of Freud in treating the relationships between parents and children quite seriously. The ...

... MANCHESTER A Simple Man NORTHERN Ballet Theatre has been given a new lease of life with the addition to its repertoire of the dance' drama A Simple Man, choreographed for them by Gillian Lynne. Based on the life and works of the famous northern artist L. S. Lowry, perhaps best known for his pictures of matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs, the work was conceived originally for BBC ...

... Carrie BROADWAY BY THE time Carrie opened at Broad way's Virginia Theatre, it was only two hours long. Apart from this new-found brevity, and a powerful, restrained performance by Betty Buckley as Car rie's fanatical mother, it was hard to find any redeeming features in the production. It duly closed after just six official performances, and some previews. Whatever possessed the RSC and Fried- ...

... The Fifteen Streets PLAYHOUSE FIRST THE Shaughraun, now The Fifteen Streets, it looks as though popular theatre is in this year, the type of theatre that was once mass entertainment. And there is nothing wrong with that. nor with the kind of massively selling novels written by Catherine Cookson. They are loved because although they are about a time and a location unknown to many of her ...

... The Midsummer Gathering HARROGATE FOR THE LAST in us current season the Harrogate Theatre present The Midsummer Gathering, a new play which they have specially commissioned from Denise Deegan, author of the very successful Daisy Pulls It Off. It is in the torm ot an entertainment of Yorkshire Dales legends and songs, set in the year 1945 when the war is nearly over. The play is set in a large ...

... Jan Decorte ICA IN THE ICA's press release Jan Decorte is hailed as Flanders' most controversial theatre director. Controversial, my eye, there can be no dispute, In Ondertussendoor (In Between the Meantime) is a confidence trick that gives three players U long minutes to get nowhere. It is as weak as charades, with none of the charm. Decorte thinks he is above every other kind of theatre ...