The Frome Festival might be over but there is plenty of summer fun still to come for visitors to the town's favourite professional community venue, The Merlin Theatre.  With an indoor 240 seat auditorium and the even bigger capacity ECOS outdoor amphitheatre available to both professional and amateur performers, the music, comedy and acting carries on both for and by all age groups.   

From 17-19 August the limelight will shine upon some of the area's youngest up and coming talent as the students of this year's Tri.Art summer school bring Our House, the Madness musical, to the stage. Featuring a collection of well-known hits including House or Fun, Baggy Trousers and It Must Be Love, and divided into Senior and Junior teams, children from aged 8 to 18 have indulged their passion for performance and made it out of bed early, even in their summer holidays, to put on an energetic and polished show suitable for all age groups.  If you have a budding actor in your house, bring them along to see what they could be doing next year themselves!

Professional touring theatre is also a significant feature of any Merlin seasonal programme and welcoming back the country's longest running outdoor company, Illyria Theatre, is always a time of celebration.  Illyria will be rounding off a summer on the ECOS amphitheatre stones with their hilarious production of Twelfth Night on Sunday 3 September.  Patrons are, as always, invited to bring picnics and rugs and make an afternoon of it with drinks and ice creams available from the theatre bar.  Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare's best known and most performed plays but the talented and stunningly energetic, volume-packed actors of Illyria Theatre will have a new take on this production, to delight a Frome crowd.

Full details of all shows coming up at the Merlin for the remainder of the year, including dates and time for their Christmas production of Elf The Musical, can be found at www.merlintheatre.co.uk