STAN’S Café as a live theatre company can always be relied upon to deliver originality and – most often – brilliant originality. Formed in the 1990s, this prolific Birmingham-based theatre company has built a reputation for artistic innovation that stretches beyond local and UK borders. Its’ projects have included work across a broad spectrum of…
DING-DONG, Hello-Hello, those Elders are in town and guess what? In my opinion this production at the Hippodrome is bigger, brasher and better than when I saw it in London. I refer of course to the phenomenon that is the multi-award winning ‘The Book of Mormon’. Picture by Paul Coltas. s This deliciously disgraceful musical…
LOUIS Sachar is an American young-adult mystery-comedy author. He is best known for the ‘Wayside School’ series and the award-winning novel ‘Holes’. In 2003, Holes was made into a movie by Disney with Sachar writing the screenplay himself. It’s probably the movie that is best known and this stage version (again by Sachar) is destined…
HAMLET is probably Shakespeare’s most performed play – I’ve lost count of the number of productions I’ve seen over the years and – as I read in his programme notes – this is Michael Barry’s third trip to Denmark as director. Picture by Jack Kirby. s As it is also Shakespeare’s most quoted play, let…
ACTRESS Jodie McNee as Johanna Faustus is a one-woman powerhouse. She spends two hours on stage expounding as much energy as would the winner of a gruelling marathon or a 15-round title fight. Her performance is relentless – from the moment where we first meet Johanna trying to levitate and time travel by having her…
THE GOLDEN rule of adapting any classic novel for the stage is that it must present what the writer intended their audience to see and feel in a comprehensible way. In essence- achieve good story telling. Tilted Wig are a new theatre company to me, but one I shall certainly be watching out for in the future….
ALAN Bennett’s multi-award winning masterpiece, ‘The History Boys’ proved to be an excellent choice for this year’s first venture into in-house production for the Wolverhampton Grand. Picture by Tim Thursfield. s The clever script, based on Bennett’s own schooldays, is set in a fictional Sheffield grammar school in the early 1980s and concerns a group…
EVERY TIME I see a Matthew Bourne production, there is a small part of me that wonders how he can possibly top his previous show. After more than 20 years of choreographing spectacular ground-breaking ballets, how can he find a way of engaging us and taking the genre to new heights? I’m happy to say…
KAY MELLOR is renowned as a powerhouse writer who has brought gritty, northern humour to stage and screen for quite a few decades. Her TV series ‘Band of Gold’ was watched by millions back in the 1990s and now, a quarter of a century later, she has revisited her much-loved Bradford sex-workers in a stage…
‘GASLIGHT’ is a ‘cop’ show – not as in the cops and robbers sense but a ‘creaky old potboiler’ that rears its head every decade or so. What made folk have nightmares back in 1934 when Patrick Hamilton’s melodrama/thriller first graced the stage, should surely today be dismissed as more farcical than fearful. Enter director…