| A Look-back and Guide |
Aberystwyth Summer Musical |
| Summer Productions , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , August 13, 2025 |
Aberystwyth Arts Centre for long had a rhythm to its year. The final touring production would perform around the end of May. The ambience would quieten with the examination period. It would flare into life again with graduations. Aberfest would run for two weeks of chamber music, classes and events. A company would arrive early July for three weeks of intensive rehearsal. Public money is for public event. It is good that the range of artistic events should include one with ten thousand tickets to sell for an audience from five counties. At its peak the Aberystwyth musical pioneered a unique hybrid of performance. The productions have propelled young performers of Wales from chorus parts to dance and drama college and professional life. From the record: Reviews below: 14 August 2025 The Wizard of Oz 15 August 2024 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory “Miriam Llwyd's Violet Beauregarde is a posturing gum-chewing West Coast influencer. Duane Gooden's father is a glitzily dressed, pushy parent for whom every setting is little more than a potential backdrop for cyber-show-off. Mike Teavee, a dynamic Owen Jac Roberts, is a game and phone-addicted millennial of a deliciously dismissive rudeness. “This is very much a production of the unique Aberystwyth style. Venues do productions and they do youth work and outreach. The Aberystwyth tradition is that the whole lot be bundled together. The preeningly confident Violet is revealed in the programme to have started at age four, won a singing award at the Urdd Eisteddfod at eleven and is not even out of school yet. Heledd Davies was first reviewed on this site in 2015. With the Oompa Loompas and other children the stage floods with a company of thirty. It is good to see a space so a-brim with colour, voice and presence.” 10 August 2023 Brassed Off “The scale of the productions amplified with Michael Bogdanov and then Anthony Williams at the helm. Its audience franchise swelled, its geographical reach extending to Powys, Pembrokeshire, Gwynedd. The three years of absence of home-grown production were sorely felt.” 03 August 2022 Operation Julie “An audience knows what it is doing. If it stands in a collective expression of uninhibited joy it is a response that happens for a reason.” 10 August 2019 “Oliver!” “Oliver!” is a big show with a lot of credits behind it. At the Arts Centre the management team led by Dafydd Rhys and Louise Amery has made it happen. The arts in the public domain is an ecology. In past years coaches have been seen from destinations in Powys, Gwynedd and Carmarthenshire. That is good and it was good to see the Arts Council of Wales present for the first night. It is good too that Nick Bache and the technical team, beneficiaries of a state-of-the-art theatre upgrade last year, have a big locally grown product to show off.” 29 July 2015 “Legally Blonde” 2“Aberystwyth’s five-week summer show is now a taut and honed production machine...It is a big show, the likely biggest after WNO in Wales’ annual calendar, and one that arrives via the tightest of rehearsal periods. That it does so with the brio, panache and flamboyance of this production is part-due to the well-established team behind it.” 30 July 2014 “Sister Act” “It is the last week of July and the epicentre of theatre in Wales has moved west. Eight or nine companies are packing their bags for the melee of Edinburgh but it is in Aberystwyth where the big show, the big noise and the big audience is happening. Nudge the person in the adjoining seat and the starting point for their journey might have been anywhere from Saundersfoot to Llanidloes. The box office is bursting good and the cast is a dream “ 06 August 2013 “Little Shop of Horrors” "Producer Alan Hewson has nudged the lustre of the Aberystwyth summer production ever upwards over recent years. The audition call gets a bursting response and a class cast flocks to spend its summer in Ceredigion. James Gillan’s Seymour starts as the universal geek in his check shirt, baggy trousers and diamond-print tank-top. Sarah Earnshaw’s Audrey, in voluptuous leopard print dress and platinum blonde hair, hovers between gaucherie and a haunted knowingness." 20 August 2012 “Magic of Musicals” charity performance 01 August 2012 “Hairspray” “Hairspray” closes with the most ecstatic scene to have played on Aberystwyth's stage. “You can't stop the beat” sings the entire cast. Indeed you can't; Arts Centre house staff report that the sheer gusting energy is bringing the audience to its feet night after night. It is a big sound from a big company. Producer Alan Hewson and director Anthony Williams have swelled the company this year to thirty-one in number.” 10 August 2011 “Chess” “Musicals live or die by melody. Some of the Andersson-Ulvaeus numbers here out-do anything that Abba ever sang. “I Know Him So Well” has two quite distinctive voices in Lori Haley Fox and Julie Stark. The staging is simple. Standing some metres apart, they form one of the lasting images this year for theatre in Wales.” 22 July 2011 “Chess” “Lori Haley Fox has done Broadway. She sings Svetlana with those Russian “r”’s and distinctive vowels. Julie Stark’s Florence has a voice so big, and so good for the material, as to defy belief. Stephen McCarthy is tall and saturnine as master manipulator Walter De Courcey, the Man from the Agency. As his Machiavellian opposite number James Dinsmore can angle his left eyebrow upward and give his mouth a disdainful, rightward twist. Nice.” 24 August 2010 “Magic of Musicals”- charity performance 26 July 2010 “Chicago” “The Aberystwyth summer musical has earned itself over a couple of decades a loyal audience franchise. From the sound of the reaction this year “Chicago” may be breaking new ground in tone and content but went down with no less rapture. What is interesting is how the Aber show has morphed into taking on the most demanding shows from the musical canon...a consistent quality producing venue it stands alongside the Watermill and the Menier Chocolate Factory.” 13 August 2009 “The King and I” “Once again Arts Centre Director Alan Hewson has attracted star quality leads to Aberystwyth. Marcus Cunningham, barefoot and bare-chested, ripples with charisma and the complexity of the character of the King” 17 August 2008 “My Fair Lady” “Twenty performances on, this production has matured into near-on three hours of near continuous pleasure.” 24 July 2008 “My Fair Lady” “The emotional impact of “My Fair Lady” lives or dies in the transformation of Eliza. Unusually, this production has opted for two, alternating Elizas with the opening night given to Elin Llwyd. “I could have danced all night”, she was radiant...her transition from lustrous trophy escort, in a shimmering cream, to wounded but tough adversary, had all the emotion the part demanded.” 28 July 2007 “West Side Story” “Sian Jenkins’ costume design reaches its peak in the dance hall number. Jets are dressed in Peppy-ish pastels and the Hispanics enter wearing blacks and reds; the ensuing mingle of dance and confrontation makes for a stunning colour mix.” 29 July 2006 “Fiddler on the Roof” “A perfectly sculpted piece of musical theatre” 30 July 2005 “Oliver” “This production of Oliver is glorious: the inhabitants of the workhouse might be devoid of humanity and joy, but this show certainly isn’t.” 25 July 2004 “Peter Karrie’s tenor voice is beautiful, and his ability to act, well, while singing, is a joy to hear.” 2 August 2001 “High Society” “A remarkably thoughtful piece that never allows its intelligence to cloud the enjoyment.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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