Stan Graham's Leisure Guide for North and West Yorkshire
There can be fewer more incongruous places to hold a Baroque concert than The Old Woollen at Farsley, especially one dedicated to music from the Restoration Theatre. This was the period immediately following the restoration of the Monarchy – obviously – after the rule of Oliver Cromwell and The Protectorate, who later went on to…
Read More
I usually try to post my reviews within a couple of days of seeing the work, but, as this play runs until 11th July, and I don’t have an editor screaming at me, I thought I would take an extra day or two to do it justice. It is always difficult reviewing a piece which…
Read More
Now here is a useless fact about ABBA, only tenuously connected with this show. Before curtain-up, there was the usual reminder regarding mobile phones etc, before a trigger warning that the show contained platform boots and white lycra. The reason that they wore such outlandish outfits was not a fashion statement per se, but came…
Read More
After my culture shock on Tuesday at Legally Blonde, where everyone was so young and speaking in weird American sorority girl accents with voices that could strip paint, I thought that my visit to Howard Assembly Room to see Teddy Thompson, might redress the balance when it came to my facing up to impending doom.…
Read More
I approached this show with a degree of trepidation in that, although never having seen the film of the same name, I had read the blurb on Leeds Grand Theatre website in order to write my monthly theatre preview for Welcome To Leeds and discovered it to be aimed at the age demographic about half…
Read More
Just because Glastonbury is lying fallow this year, it doesn’t mean that there are no get togethers available. In fact, odd as it sounds, this year’s Leeds International African Arts Festival could be just the right alternative. There is music, dance, food and, should the weather turn wet, there are even muddy fields to wallow…
Read More
Being an only child I tended to do a lot of reading and Enid Blyton was one of my first go-to authors. It is probably the Yorkshire influence that, whilst the other readers I knew were into The Famous Five books, I opted for The Secret Seven series. Buy 5 get 2 free! I was…
Read More
If ever a show differed from expectations it is this one. It should have been obvious before the curtain went up when the usual mobile phone warning against recoding and photography was issued, as it contained the pearl of wisdom that ‘memory is the best camera’. I avoided seeing the 1984 film as I was…
Read More
The Zombies is one of the early 1960s groups (that’s what we called bands in those days) I missed out on seeing. I can only think that they were not on any of the packages whose tours took in Leeds Odeon cinema, as I saw most of those which did. It was really good to…
Read More
After all the articles I have written about theatre you would have thought I had seen about everything, so did I, but here I was, leaving York Theatre Royal, munching on a piece of caraway bread that I had just seen been baked live on stage. The thing is that it wasn’t done during a…
Read More
Tyke It To The Limit 