What a Witch’s cast Marama Corlett is playing in Lillian Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour”, starring Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss, which will begin previews on January 22 at the West End’s Comedy Theatre. Ian Rickson will direct the production, which has extended its booking period through April 30, rather than the previously announced April 2.

Hellman’s play focuses on the events that transpire after a troubled teenager starts to spin a web of deceit about two teachers at an all-girls boarding school.

In The Children’s Hour, Marama Corlett plays Lois Fisher. She doesn’t get things as quickly as all the other girls and struggles a lot with Latin.’ To Marama, the play is about a lie that expresses issues of love and fear, on many different levels. One of the cool things about the play is that the majority of characters are female. It is usually the other way round.’

For more information and tickets, click here.

Wunderland by What a Witch’s score composer Ralf Hildenbeutel follows up the preview purely with strings and piano recorded album Lucy’s Dream, however it is much more continuating and playful. You hear accordeons, piano, glockenspiel and strings, toypiano and ukuleles, partly peppered with spoken vocal pieces like sequences from movies.

The stringquartet at the sea (”Heimweh”), a reverby piano (”Merry goes round”), canonlikes playing kalimbas, the rythmic The Feast (Musicvideo made by What a Witch’s Director Boris Seewald), an almost epical “From Elsewhere” or the walz The Spirits that I Called with Dorit Chrysler playing the theremin (this fascinating instrument which is played by the distance from the hands to two aerials) shows the variety of the new album.

The recordings have been made whithin the last two years. Whenever there was time inbetween other projects and productions Ralf collected numberless ideas, bits and pieces, archived them, elaborated them. Collected items such as toypiano, accordeons or the old violin of his grandfather have been used as well as harp, guitars or an old french glockenspiel.

The album was completed by the wunderful artwork of the German-Russian artist Sonja Sofia Yakovleva.

Lean back and enjoy. Again a very personal album of the artist who recommends to listen to it at once. It seems a bit old-fahioned in these days but it increases the pleasure of listening exquisitely…