Stan Graham's Leisure Guide for North and West Yorkshire
Top of the Wold kicks off the 55th season of productions from Mikron, who will be touring the country from their base on a narrowboat called Tyseley. It chugs along waterways stopping at various locations allowing them to set up stage and perform one of the two musical plays written especially for the year. 2026…
Read More
In a previous review I said that the most effective way of making sense of statistics and generalities is to humanise them by concentrating on a single example. This play takes that premise and extends it, not only to include the way in which we look at a perpetrator, but the way in which they,…
Read More
So far it looks as though 2026 will go down as the Year of the Dance. I can’t remember seeing so many productions of the genre in such a short period of time, and more are just around the corner. It’s lucky that I have come to enjoy this medium, if not downright love it.…
Read More
If you are a bit short of wedge this summer, why not visit Leeds City Centre where you will be able to collect loads of them. Anyone in town in 2024 would have thought that Waddington’s had the MONOPOLY of board games but they would have reckoned without Hasbro, the makers of TRIVIAL PURSUIT, who…
Read More
This play os a musical based on the real story of Walter Tull, a man whose life was full of incident and tragedy. It was written by Dougie Blaxland, composed by Chris Anthony and directed by Amanda Horlock in conjunction with Show Racism The Red Card. Although a low-key, three-hander with minimal set and props,…
Read More
What an amazing night. This is what a showbiz bio-musical should be. The ups and downs of a star’s career, done with respect, honesty, humour and plenty of banging tunes. Producers of Sunny Afternoon take note! If you were going to write a fictional account of a soul singer turned rock superstar, this would be…
Read More
When trying to tell a story based on a complex set of circumstances, there is no better way than to extract the essence by personalising it. To say that there were 1,027 passengers on HMT Empire Windrush, with over 800 from the Caribbean, on its first sailing from Jamaica to to UK in June 1948,…
Read More
Yet another first for me, not just in the play itself, but also the venue, which I had never even heard of before the visit, let alone been to. It is in the Leeds City College School of Creative Arts, Quarry Hill Campus next door to Leeds Playhouse and is a very intimate room which…
Read More
Tuesday, March 10th saw the big reveal at Howard Assembly Room, no, not the most recent names in the Epstein Files, the latest celebrity to be banned from the BBC or Sir Keir Starmer telling us that his dad was a toolmaker, but the runners and riders in the 2026/27 Opera North Season. To continue…
Read More
I always say, you can never have too many dance shows (actually I don’t, but I had to start somehow), which is just as well because last week I had three! This one was different in several ways, the main ones being that it was not concerned with sexual orientation and there doesn’t seem to…
Read More
Tyke It To The Limit 