Stan Graham's Leisure Guide for North and West Yorkshire
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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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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Tyke It To The Limit 