Stan Graham's Leisure Guide for North and West Yorkshire
Now here’s a novel idea. To celebrate 40 years of this iconic musical, Music Theatre International and Cameron Mackintosh Limited decided to allow amateur organisations to perform the show for the first time. Rather than just release the score, directions and other elements of the West End production to all and sundry, they chose eleven…
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I think that the cushiest job on the stage must be the part of the Pharaoh in this musical. You can spend the first half in the Green Room with your feet up and then pop on to do your feature number, have another cup of tea slip on for a couple of cameos and…
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It was back to basics last night with a play from ThickSkin and Pentabus, written by Tim Foley, called – you guessed it – Driftwood. Although pared down in the production department, it still had some very imaginative video effects, sound and lighting, powerfully getting the message across. The work is about two brothers and…
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Jane Eyre was not a novel on the reading list of a slum kid from East Leeds in the 1950s even though it was written by a Yorkshirewoman about an orphan girl who grew up in hardship. My first encounter with Ms Eyre was a television adaptation in 1963 on a small black and white…
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The night before I saw this production I had been to a show which had spawned a Netflix series, tonight I thought I might be in for the reverse, an Amazon Prime programme adapted for the stage. I quite like Jeremy Clarkson so was agog with anticipation. Not for the first time in my life…
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I was not familiar with this work until I saw the Leeds Playhouse website, telling me that it had spawned a tv series, so I took a sneaky peek at the show on Netflix. Rather than start at Episode 1, which I thought would just be a scene setter, I skipped to the third one…
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Somebody, somewhere, must be taking notice of the stuff I write because, after complaining about the inability to catch the names of a lot of the pieces played in concerts due to their being in a foreign language or the lack of a programme/set list – neither being the fault of Howard Assembly Room –…
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I admit to having approached this evening with more than a little apprehension. I have seen productions by Phoenix Dance Theatre in the past, but they were either short works or composites. Inside Giovanni’s Room, however, was a full length adaptation of the 1956 cult classic novel, Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin, so, the question…
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Now here’s a trip down Memory Lane. I was taken by my mum and dad to see the film when it first came out and all I can remember was being bored! I have just looked it up and the release date is 1954, but it would have been a bit later than that by…
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After my overdose of The Magic Flute, it is folk music which seems to have filled the void. I pointed out that the artists on last week’s gig were individual performers, being support and main act, here we had two artists who were a duo, but also appeared singly as their own warm-up. Kerching! Aidan…
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Tyke It To The Limit 