Stan Graham's Leisure Guide for North and West Yorkshire
It was great to be back at the wonderful Howard Assembly Room after a three-month enforced break. No, I wasn’t banned, although goodness knows why not. Anyway, the reason I was there was to get back into the swing of things by seeing David Brewis perform his new album, The Soft Struggles. I have to…
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I have to admit that I have enjoyed the television exploits of the Brighton-based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. It makes a change to have a copper who is neither an alcoholic nor serial womaniser and is a victim in his private life rather than an aggressor. I was, therefore, looking forward to seeing what Stage…
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Sinfonia is the centrepiece of a project between The Performance Ensemble, Leeds Playhouse, Leeds Museums and Galleries and Leeds Older People’s Forum for LEEDS 2023, under the umbrella title of 1001 Stories. Leeds Playhouse has surrendered their premises from 24th April – 6th May to the above to facilitate a series of productions from those…
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I can’t believe that it is over three years since I saw this show at Leeds Playhouse, how time flies when you are in a pandemic. In the interim it has undergone a total cast change and, after touring the country’s theatres, it has enjoyed a successful run in the West End. This production has…
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Now here’s a novelty, Mikron Theatre Company performing in a real theatre! They normally put on their shows in the most unlikely places such as allotments, museums (should that be musea?), pubs, village halls, allotments and even a lifeboat station. I have seen two of their productions before, one in a working men’s club (the…
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Lord of the Flies is a novel by William Golding set firmly in its time. It was published in 1954 although written a couple of years earlier and rejected by several publishers. It was Golding’s response to a novel he had read, The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean by R M Ballantyne…
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After a break in proceedings I returned to the fold to see the touring production of Sister Act. As it happens, the musical has also had an enforced hiatus so we both resumed normal service together. Actually, it wasn’t quite normal service for either of us as the show began, and ended, 20 minutes late…
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In the programme the director, Radula Gaitanou, says she wishes that opera were more like football, with the audience not knowing the outcome until the end. Well, she certainly walked the walk in this production, turning it into a game of two halves and, not until the penalty shoot-out at the end, do we find…
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Some months ago a good friend of mine asked if I had seen the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I replied in the negative and he said that he highly recommended it so, as we seem to share the same taste in quite a few things, especially red wine, I caught it the next…
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It had to happen, I have at last seen a modified version of a Shakespeare play that I actually enjoyed. Although I still feel that, if the Trade Descriptions Act applied to the theatre, saying that what we saw was written by the Bard of Avon would be pushing it to the limits, the way…
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Tyke It To The Limit 