HOME





Annemarie Lewis Thomas
Annemarie Lewis Thomas is a musical director, composer, lyricist. She founded the Musical Theatre Academy (MTA) in 2009, which was named as The Stage's ''School of the Year'' in 2012 and 2017. Early career Thomas trained at Middlesex Polytechnic, graduating with a BA(Hons) in Performing Arts in 1989. From 1994 to 2004 she was musical director of fringe theatre company, ''The Steam Industry'' with productions including ''Seven Brides for Seven Brothers'', ''The King & I'', ''The Sound of Music'' and the UK stage premiere of ''Calamity Jane'', all at Battersea Arts Centre (BAC). Thomas has been commissioned by British Youth Music Theatre (BYMT) to write several musicals including ''CCTV'', ''The Open Door'', ''Girl In The Ashes'', ''Great Expectations'' and ''Fool’s Gold''. Composition Thomas has written the music and lyrics for almost 50 musicals including: Thomas also wrote the music and lyrics for the following pantomimes with the book by Daniel O'Brien: ''Cinderella' ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Swansea, Wales
Swansea ( ; ) is a coastal city and the second-largest city of Wales. It forms a principal area, officially known as the City and County of Swansea (). The city is the twenty-eighth largest in the United Kingdom. Located along Swansea Bay in south-west Wales, with the principal area covering the Gower Peninsula, it is part of the Swansea Bay region and part of the historic county of Glamorgan and the ancient Welsh commote of Gŵyr. The principal area is the second most populous local authority area in Wales, with an estimated population of in . Swansea, along with Neath and Port Talbot, forms the Swansea urban area, with a population of 300,352 in 2011. It is also part of the Swansea Bay City Region. During the 19th-century industrial heyday, Swansea was the key centre of the copper-smelting industry, earning the nickname ''Copperopolis''. Etymologies The Welsh name, ''Abertawe'', translates as ''mouth/estuary of the Tawe'' and this name was likely used for the are ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Yvonne Arnaud Theatre
The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre is a theatre located in Guildford, Surrey, England. Named after the actress Yvonne Arnaud, it presents a series of locally produced and national touring productions, including opera, ballet and pantomime. The theatre has two performance venues, the main auditorium and the smaller Mill Studio. History Replacing a former repertory theatre in North Street which had been gutted by a fire in 1963, the present complex was opened in 1965 in a riverside site, incorporating a restaurant and bar available to non-theatregoers. Sir Michael Redgrave had ceremonially driven the first pile in October 1962. The foundation stone was laid by Vanessa Redgrave in September 1963, who commemorated the occasion by casting her foot in concrete. Susan Hampshire "topped out" the roof of the theatre on 11 November 1964. The company opted to dispense with traditional repertory theatre in favour of a more flexible model in which actors are cast as appropriate to different prod ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Wimbledon Studios
Wimbledon Film & Television Studios is an English film and television production company and facilities provider, located in Colliers Wood, between Mitcham and Wimbledon in south London. History Wimbledon Studios was established as the Merton Studios. The studios were previously a wine-distribution warehouse, which was acquired by Thames Television as a replacement for their Barlby Road base in North Kensington in the early 1990s. The studios were also used for the Channel 5 soap opera ''Family Affairs'', which was produced by Thames and had moved from a site in Hayes. An exterior street set was built for the programme, which has also since been used by other productions and is available for hire. Thames which later became Talkback Thames stayed at the studios until 2010 when ''The Bill'', by then the only show produced there, ended. After the cancellation of ''The Bill'' by ITV, Talkback Thames's owners, FremantleMedia, sold the studios. Panther Securities Plc purchas ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Shaw Theatre
The Shaw Theatre is a theatre in Somers Town, in the London Borough of Camden. It is a part of the Pullman London St Pancras hotel, located off Euston Road. The Shaw has 446 seats and two large foyers, four large dressing rooms for up to 60 people and extensive high-quality backstage facilities which include a workshop studio and laundry facilities. There is disabled access, cloakroom facilities and a bar serving drinks and refreshments. The venue is also used for exhibitions. History of The Shaw Theatre The Shaw Theatre originally opened its doors in 1971 as a purpose-built theatre within the St Pancras library, originally known as ''The Library Theatre''. The opening production was the show '' Zigger Zagger'' with a cast that included Barrie Rutter and Paula Wilcox. In 1972, Simon Ward and Sinéad Cusack appeared in ''Romeo and Juliet''. Later in the same year Vanessa Redgrave, Nyree Dawn Porter and Windsor Davies starred in ''Twelfth Night''. Other stars who appeared ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Dick Whittington And His Cat
''Dick Whittington and His Cat'' is the English folklore surrounding the real-life Richard Whittington ( 1354 – 1423), wealthy merchant and later Lord Mayor of London. The legend describes his rise from poverty-stricken childhood with the fortune he made through the sale of his cat to a rat-infested country. Although the real Whittington was actually of high birth and likely did not own a cat, he did become a merchant and politician and was remembered for his public projects and charitable investments. Another element in the legend is that Dick attempted to flee his service as a scullion one night, heading towards home (or reached Highgate Hill in later tradition), but was dissuaded by the sound of Bow bells, which promised he would be mayor of London one day. Since the pre-Victorian era, the story has been a favourite subject of British pantomime, especially during Christmas season. Overview Written forms date from the early 1600s, over 150 years after the death of the h ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Mother Goose
Mother Goose is a character that originated in children's fiction, as the imaginary author of a collection of French fairy tales and later of English nursery rhymes. She also appeared in a song, the first stanza of which often functions now as a nursery rhyme. The character also appears in a pantomime tracing its roots to 1806.Jeri Studebaker, ''Breaking the Mother Goose Code'', Moon Books 2015Chapter 6/ref> The term's appearance in English dates back to the early 18th century, when Charles Perrault's fairy tale collection, ''Contes de ma Mère l'Oye'', was first translated into English as ''Tales of My Mother Goose''. Later a compilation of English nursery rhymes, titled ''Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle'', helped perpetuate the name both in Britain and the United States. The character Mother Goose's name was identified with English collections of stories and nursery rhymes popularised in the 17th century. English readers would already have been familiar w ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Robinson Crusoe
''Robinson Crusoe'' ( ) is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. Written with a combination of Epistolary novel, epistolary, Confessional writing, confessional, and Didacticism, didactic forms, the book follows the title character (born Robinson Kreutznaer) after he is castaway, cast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering Human cannibalism, cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" (now part of Chile) which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano (sailor), Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel. The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real p ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Beauty And The Beast
"Beauty and the Beast" is a fairy tale written by the French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740 in (''The Young American and Marine Tales''). Villeneuve's lengthy version was abridged, rewritten, and published by French novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756 in ''Magasin des enfants'' (''Children's Collection'') to produce the most commonly retold version. Later, Andrew Lang retold the story in ''Andrew Lang's Fairy Books#The Blue Fairy Book (1889), Blue Fairy Book'', a part of the ''Fairy Book'' series, in 1889. The fairy-tale was influenced by the story of Petrus Gonsalvus as well as Ancient Greece, Ancient Latin stories such as "Cupid and Psyche" from ''The Golden Ass'', written by Apuleius, Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis in the second century AD, and "The Pig King", an Italian fairy-tale published by Giovanni Francesco Straparola in ''The Facetious Nights of Straparola'' around 1550. Variants of the tale are known across Europe.H ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Aladdin
Aladdin ( ; , , ATU 561, 'Aladdin') is a Middle-Eastern folk tale. It is one of the best-known tales associated with '' One Thousand and One Nights'' (often known in English as ''The Arabian Nights''), despite not being part of the original text; it was added by the Frenchman Antoine Galland, based on a folk tale that he heard from the Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab.Razzaque (2017) Sources Known along with Ali Baba as one of the "orphan tales", the story was not part of the original ''Nights'' collection and has no authentic Arabic textual source, but was incorporated into the book '' Les mille et une nuits'' by its French translator, Antoine Galland. John Payne quotes passages from Galland's unpublished diary recording Galland's encounter with a Maronite storyteller from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab. According to Galland's diary, he met with Hanna, who had travelled from Aleppo to Paris with celebrated French traveller Paul Lucas, on March 25, 1709. Galland's diary furthe ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Puss In Boots
"Puss in Boots" (; ; ; ) is a European fairy tale about an anthropomorphic cat who uses trickery and deceit to gain power, wealth, and the hand in marriage of a princess for his penniless and low-born master. The oldest written telling version (Italian for "Lucky Costantino") by Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola, included in ''The Facetious Nights of Straparola'' (), in which the cat is a fairy in disguise who helps his owner, a poor boy named Costantino from Bohemia, to gain his princess by duping a king, a lord, and many commoners. There is a version written by Girolamo Morlini, from whom Straparola used various tales in ''The Facetious Nights''; another version was published in 1634 by Giambattista Basile with the title . The most popular version of the tale was written in French at the close of the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a retired civil servant and member of the . Puss in Boots appears in DreamWorks' ''Shrek'' franchise, appea ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Cinderella
"Cinderella", or "The Little Glass Slipper", is a Folklore, folk tale with thousands of variants that are told throughout the world.Dundes, Alan. Cinderella, a Casebook. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. The protagonist is a young girl living in forsaken circumstances who is suddenly blessed by remarkable fortune, with her ascension to the throne via marriage. The story of Rhodopis, recounted by the Greek geographer Strabo sometime between 7 BC and AD 23, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, is usually considered to be the earliest known variant of the Cinderella story. The first literary European version of the story was published in Italy by Giambattista Basile in his ''Pentamerone'' in 1634. The version that is now most widely known in the English-speaking world was published in French by Charles Perrault in ''Histoires ou contes du temps passé'' (translation: "Histories or tales of times passed") in 1697 as ''Cendrillon'' and was anglicize ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]