JULIET Forster has cut it as a director of Romeo And Juliet many times. Now she has sliced Shakespeare s two the two hours traffic of our stage to 45 minutes, maybe 50, for CBeebies show tomorrow morning. I did joke about that at rehearsals because my previous production, at Blenheim Palace, ran to three hours and 15 minutes, says Juliet, York Theatre Royal s creative director. She had been lined up for the children s television production as long ago as December 2019. Anna Perowne, who has produced the performance, had newly taken over BBC Shakespeare, having worked previously for the Royal Shakespeare Company, says Juliet.
REVIEW: York Theatre Royal’s Travelling Pantomime, Jack And The Beanstalk, New Earswick Folk Hall, York (Saturday, December 5) NO Rolling Stones show goes by without rock’n’roll’s greatest paleontological survivor, Keith Richards, leaning into his microphone to mumble: “It’s good to be here…it’s good to be anywhere”. Lo and behold, “It’s great to be here…it’s kind of great to be anywhere,” says York Theatre Royal Travelling Pantomime’s comic turn, Josh “Just Joshing” Benson, at the outset of Saturday evening’s Covid-secure, socially distanced, temperature-tested, bubble-seated pantomime. How right he is. Saturday was day four of the new dawn of the York Theatre Royal pantomime, the first after 40 years in the wildness of the Dame Berwick Kaler era. Until Covid-19 became the joyless new villain, out to destroy the land of theatre, Cinderella was to have marked the transition from Kaler capers to a new partnership with regular Great Britis