Stan Graham's Leisure Guide for North and West Yorkshire
Typical, you wait 76 years for a dance production about lesbians and then two come along at once. Gentleman Jack is a true story based on the life and times of Anne Lister, who was from a coal mining family; for once not the pick and shovel end but the ownership side. She acted as…
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It’s not often I get to visit a lesbian cabaret club on a Wednesday night, or any night for that matter, so, when asked to this one I couldn’t refuse, and I am glad I didn’t. This wasn’t any old lesbian cabaret club, it was Le Monacle and not any old Wednesday, it was a…
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And so my second season of Baroque music begins – with a trip back to school. Not the one I went to, which has long since closed down, but a magnificent complex on the outskirts of the City in Alwoodley, complete with its own theatre, named after local legend, Barry Cryer. The theme of the…
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The hardest part of writing reviews as far as I am concerned, is staring at a blank screen and wondering how I can find a theme to make what I am about to key onto it interesting. One day I might actually get it right. From the moment, some time last year, I saw that…
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I really do seem to have crossed to the dark side this past couple of weeks. After Peter Grimes and A Midsummer Night’s Dream I find myself watching a ballet about Snow White. This is not the Disneyfied version with singing dwarves, however, but the original fairy tale, collected, appropriately,by the Brothers Grimm, and retold…
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You wait years for stage productions to begin with a period of silence and then we get two in a week! Although adhering to the Mafia code of omertà, and the indication that what followed was going to be out of the ordinary, the opening scenes of Peter Grimes and A Midsummer Night’s Dream could…
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I still regard myself as being a newcomer to opera although, when I think back, I have now been to quite a few productions. This one is unlike any of the others in many ways. First of all there are no bonkers characters, making it an opera for grown-ups. There are touches of comedy but…
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Here’s another first, a visit to Riley Theatre in the Northern School of Contemporary Dance at the bottom of Chapeltown Road. I pass this place every time I go to Leeds but have never had occasion to visit before. I was invited to go see a production aimed at the younger end of the theatre-going…
Read MoreWhen I was a lad of about 11 or 12 I was addicted to the Sherlock Holmes books. I didn’t read them all, but enough to keep me out of mischief for a few months. Apart from that side effect, I really enjoyed them, so was looking forward to seeing what Blackeyed Theatre had done…
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After a couple of fairly frivolous productions since the turn of the year, I was made to connect with the ‘real world’ in this one-woman show concerning life in Gaza as seen through the eyes of the children who live, and die, there. Rather than being a diatribe against the conflict per se, it focussed…
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Tyke It To The Limit 