Stan Graham's Leisure Guide for North and West Yorkshire
All I can say is that it is about time! Ever since I was taken to the pantomime at the Grand Theatre in the 1950s and on all of my visits to see a show, an opera or a gig at Howard Assembly Room since then, the evening has always ended with the audience shouting…
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During the 1940s when times were more innocent, there was a phenomenon known as Sweater Girls. They were female film stars who wore tight-fitting jumpers in order to accentuate their figures for publicity photographs. When I was invited to see Jersey Boys I thought that the days of gender inclusivity had caught up and there…
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Just over a week ago I went to a lunchtime concert by the Orchestra and Chorus of Opera North entitled Summertime. On Sunday I went to another called Opera In The City in Millennium Square which should really have been named Singin’ in The Rain. The concert started at 5.30pm, about half an hour after…
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What better day than Friday, 22nd July to celebrate tequila, being just two days before the United States’ National Tequila Day. OK, I have answered my own question there but I feel that Friday evening is far more conducive to celebrating anything than is a Sunday. There is much more to tequila than meets the…
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I recently wrote an article about The Craft Centre and Design Gallery and was really disappointed that the workshops scheduled for the Spring/Summer Season clashed with events I had already committed to attending. By a quirk of fate one was moved meaning that I could benefit from both that one and this. Result! The workshop…
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Friday, 22nd July sees the first Leeds Tequila Festival which will be held at The Tetley, but you knew that already from the heading. The event is being organised by Rolling Social Events who have already brought us festivals of rum, gin and whisky, in fact they have probably put more people in touch with…
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It was just my luck to discover last year’s Dewsbury Town Hall Lunchtime Concert Season only in time to catch the last one so I had resigned myself to waiting until the end of September for the next. What a pleasant surprise to find out that there was a one-off event to celebrate Summertime on…
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Although not the first of their musicals to be performed commercially, this is an early effort by a couple of young chaps called Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber, who haven’t done too badly for themselves since they penned this 15-minute piece for their school concert in 1968. Amazingly they had already written a full-scale musical…
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It has been a long time coming but Kino looks as though it has been well worth the wait. Years of planning and hard work have gone into the redevelopment of the magnificent building providing the most stunning entrance foyer and atrium to the Howard Assembly Room, and we now have a beautiful new restaurant…
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To mark Refugee Week, Howard Assembly Room mounted a concert to showcase some of the amazing talent brought to this country by those escaping intolerable conditions, some even life-threatening, in their birth countries. It is appropriate that Leeds is participating as the city has largely been built by immigrants from around the world. Just think…
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Tyke It To The Limit 