Author: Laura Robinson

To understand the new smart watched and other pro devices of recent focus, we should look to Silicon Valley and the quantified movement of the latest generation. Apple’s Watch records exercise, tracks our moves throughout the day, assesses the amount of time we are stood up and reminds us to get up and move around if we have been sat for too long – let’s not forget Tim Cook’s “sitting is the new factor” line. Diana saves Steve Trevor who has crashed on Themyscira. He warns her of the great war, World War I, raging across the globe. Wonder Woman…

To understand the new smart watched and other pro devices of recent focus, we should look to Silicon Valley and the quantified movement of the latest generation. Apple’s Watch records exercise, tracks our moves throughout the day, assesses the amount of time we are stood up and reminds us to get up and move around if we have been sat for too long – let’s not forget Tim Cook’s “sitting is the new factor” line. Diana saves Steve Trevor who has crashed on Themyscira. He warns her of the great war, World War I, raging across the globe. Wonder Woman…

To understand the new smart watched and other pro devices of recent focus, we should look to Silicon Valley and the quantified movement of the latest generation. Apple’s Watch records exercise, tracks our moves throughout the day, assesses the amount of time we are stood up and reminds us to get up and move around if we have been sat for too long – let’s not forget Tim Cook’s “sitting is the new factor” line. Diana saves Steve Trevor who has crashed on Themyscira. He warns her of the great war, World War I, raging across the globe. Wonder Woman…

Millicent Simmonds turns 19 on Sunday, but already her extraordinary presence on screen is one of the reasons the Quiet Place movies have made such a big noise at the box office, taking more than half a billion pounds globally.Until director John Krasinski picked her, she’d made just one other feature film: Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, which played the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.Millicent — Millie to her friends — admits she was nervous when Krasinski told her that after A Quiet Place her role had been beefed up and she’d be carrying the sequel as the lead. But she said: ‘There…

An A-to-Z of stars — or, to be more precise, a B-to-W (Michael Ball to Hannah Waddingham) — are to honour musical legend Stephen Sondheim.Impresario Cameron Mackintosh, a friend of the composer for half a century, told me exclusively that he has had confirmed commitments from an array of top names from stage and television.Linked together like a musical daisy chain, they include Ball, Petula Clark, Judi Dench, Daniel Evans, Bonnie Langford, Adrian Lester, Damien Lewis Julia McKenzie, Elaine Paige, Bernadette Peters, Clive Rowe, Imelda Staunton, Ms Waddingham; plus others, to be announced later.They will take part in a special…

At the age of six, Amara Okereke became obsessed with My Fair Lady and spent her childhood idly thinking wouldn’t it be loverly to one day play Cockney ‘guttersnipe’ Eliza Doolittle — one of the Crown Jewels of musical roles.And, by Jove, she’s got it!Okereke, 25, has been chosen by Broadway director Bartlett Sher to play Eliza at the London Coliseum in May.Downton Abbey star Harry Hadden-Paton will take on Professor Henry Higgins, the phonetics expert who bets that he can pass Eliza off as a duchess at an embassy ball by the time he’s finished giving her lessons in…

Dawn French will help lead the traditional pantomime back onto the London Palladium stage, promising ‘much merriment and happiness, downright cheek — and cheeks’.She will play Dame Trott, Jack’s mum in Jack And The Beanstalk, in a £2 million show that will run at London’s most famous variety house for five weeks, joining its core Christmas gang: Julian Clary, Paul Zerdin, Nigel Havers and Gary Wilmot.’We’ve waited two years,’ she said in a statement about bringing the classic panto into the Palladium.Yesterday Jack And The Beanstalk director and producer Michael Harrison explained that after French played the evil queen in…

Oscar-winning star Alicia Vikander will keep her head when she portrays the last of Henry VIII’s six wives in a new film about the perils of being wed to the much-married monarch.Vikander will share the screen, and the throne, with Jude Law as the King.Producer Gabrielle Tana told me last night that she’s thrilled to have signed Vikander to play Katherine Parr in the psychological thriller Firebrand, based on Elizabeth Fremantle’s best-selling historical novel Queen’s Gambit. ‘You can see why we’re not able to use that title,’ Tana joked, alluding to the Netflix phenomenon The Queen’s Gambit, which starred Anya Taylor-Joy.Firebrand…

Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall wants audiences at her musical — based on the film Saving Grace, starring Brenda Blethyn as a widow who turns to growing marijuana to pay off her husband’s debts —to leave the theatre high… on her songs.’I want everyone to come out whistling their favourite tune,’ Edinburgh-born Tunstall told me, adding that for the show to work, it’s important ‘that there are stand-alone songs that you can go off and sing in the shower’.Speaking over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, the singer, whose hits include Suddenly I See and Black Horse And The Cherry…

The widow of legendary funnyman Ken Dodd has licensed all theatrical rights to his material — the ticklish gags, comedy routines, Diddymen scripts and songs that had audiences rolling in the aisles over his six-decade career — for an undisclosed sum to a top West End producer to create a theatre show about his life.I can reveal that Michael Harrison, who presents the pantomimes at the London Palladium and hit musical The Drifters Girl, among others, licensed the treasure trove of rib-ticklers from Lady Anne Dodd, who married the comedian two days before he died, aged 90, in 2018.The couple had…