Thursday, February 13

North West

The Royal Variety Performance 2020 – Blackpool Opera House
North West

The Royal Variety Performance 2020 – Blackpool Opera House

Well, it’s that time of year again! Christmas TV is well under way and so we are welcomed into the Blackpool Opera House (via our screens) for this year’s Royal Variety Performance. With the stage set, and the virtual audience in their seats, the night fulfilled the show’s yearly promise of talent and festive cheer. Jason Manford opened the show by journeying through the theatre to the stage, whilst singing Webber’s “As If We Never Said Goodbye”. A poignant and rousing start to the night. As Manford also hosted the Oliviers last month, it seems he is the voice of the theatre world at the moment. He used this position to present with humility, humour and class. The show was filled with its usual spectacular line-up of stars. From Gary Barlow singing his new hit “Incredible”, (an adjec...
ALLO Opera – Online Opera Gala
North West

ALLO Opera – Online Opera Gala

Tonight, I had the absolute pleasure of viewing ALLO Opera’s inaugural recorded Opera Gala. We find ourselves in a time when live performances are scant so any opportunity to enjoy a fantastic evening of singing is to be grasped with both hands. Of course, with the current climate, social distancing is the order of the day and I was delighted to find that the performers found a perfect way to maintain the 3-meter rule for singers to make sure everyone was safe. Ross Cumming took first performance and also doubled up as a more than capable compare for the evening. His rich tone and strength of voice complimented the Mendelssohn Elijah piece, Lord God of Abraham, and it was sung with a great reverence and sensitivity. He presented a totally different tone for Ach wir Armen Leute from Hump...
Panto.Demic – Altrincham Garrick Playhouse
North West

Panto.Demic – Altrincham Garrick Playhouse

Pantomime is well and truly a British institution, and although the traditional festive offering might not be playing in theatres up and down the country this year as it normally would, the tradition of Panto has always had the capacity to adapt with the times, and even during a pandemic, the team at the fantastic Altrincham Garrick Theatre continue to entertain their audiences even during a national lockdown with a special pre-recorded ‘Panto-demic’ short for the whole family to sit down together and enjoy! The Altrincham Garrick have a well-deserved reputation for delivering one of the best family-friendly pantomimes in the North West and I’d be the first to say I was thoroughly excited to be sat in those red theatre chairs with a packet of wine gums in hand ready to sit back and enjo...
The Bald Soprano – Magpie Theatre
North West

The Bald Soprano – Magpie Theatre

The Bald Soprano is an absurdist play by Eugène Ionesco, first performed in French in 1950, consisting of meaningless banter and nonsensical truisms – probably drawn from an English primer – and holds the world record for the play that has been staged continuously in the same theatre for the longest time. The play opens to an English couple, Mr Smith (Alex Burke) and Mrs Smith (Solenna le Goff), sat in their living room engaging in small talk about what they ate for dinner. Their conversation quickly turns to an almost incomprehensible discussion about Bobby Watson, who it transpires was the name of several people all at once: a man; his wife; their children; and most other members of their extended families. Their maid, Mary (Tsen Day-Beaver), enters to announce their guests have arriv...
RENT – Hope Mill Theatre
North West

RENT – Hope Mill Theatre

Seasons of Love 525,600 minutes 525,000 moments so dear 525,600 minutes How do you measure, measure a year? The opening refrain of the most iconic song in Jonathon Larson's stunning 1988 reimagination of  Puccini's 'La Bohème', never felt more timely and relevant than it did last night. As the first night of this radical and exciting new production simultaneously became the closing night, due to the imposition of the latest lockdown, we were left to ponder how much more the theatrical community has to do in order to be allowed to make a living in 2020. It has been 229 days since I last was allowed to review a live piece of theatre (329,760 minutes if you're counting), and I floated on air past the temperature checks, socially distanced staff and in house screens, just so hap...
Stowaway – Liverpool Irish Festival
North West

Stowaway – Liverpool Irish Festival

Liverpool Irish Festival was established to provide a permanent, annual event to celebrate the Irish contribution to Liverpool’s cultural identity and heritage, regularly providing a rich array of arts, literature, film, music, and drama. The current pandemic has provided a new challenge for the Festival to overcome with normally staged performances now transferred to Zoom and Barbara Marsh’s fifth play is no exception to the rule, with the romantic drama – written in response to a Scriptshop theme of ‘leaving’ – put together as a scratch reading under the direction of Zara Marie Brown. Ted (Steve Dean) works as a steward on a passenger ship with Paddy (Daryl Holden), and is bringing pregnant wife Annie (Mairi-Claire Kennedy) and teenage son Jimmy (Lew Freeburn) on the next sailing as a...
Mrs Shaw Herself – Liverpool Irish Festival
North West

Mrs Shaw Herself – Liverpool Irish Festival

Started in 2003 to celebrate the links between Liverpool and Ireland, the Liverpool Irish Festival has always been a highlight of the city’s cultural calendar, bringing a range of arts, literature, film, music, and drama.  However, it is unlikely that any year has been as challenging as this one, with venues closed, social distancing, and so on. Drama is one of the areas most affected by the restrictions, unless the company has access to the type of technology that has been used in the recent streaming for cinema of productions by, for example, the National Theatre and the RSC. However, the online performance of Mrs Shaw Herself, by the Wirral-born writer and musician Helen Tierney, who plays the harp in the change from one ‘scene’ to another, and co-devised with Alexis Leighton, w...
Wake the Dragon – St Luke’s Bombed Out Church
North West

Wake the Dragon – St Luke’s Bombed Out Church

Wake the Dragon was a free event and part of Liverpool Ignitus Festival of Performing Arts and the event managed in partnership with St Luke’s Bombed Out Church, Bring the Fire Project, and Zest Event Management, and with funding from Culture Liverpool’s Without Walls scheme. With a focus on wellbeing, the event was a platform for some of Liverpool’s finest performing artists and organisations to flex their creative muscle and do what they do best: perform and connect with their audience, this time with the added constraint of social distancing. There were three specific acts listed, opening with international theatre company Teatro Pomodoro who also served as MC for the night. Our bubble of four (two couples in case you’re wondering), all of whom met at the celebrated École Phillipe...
Swan Song – Liverpool Theatre Festival
North West

Swan Song – Liverpool Theatre Festival

Award-winning writer Jonathan Harvey’s clever monologue was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival and Hampstead Theatre in 1997. Reimagined by Harvey for the Liverpool Theatre Festival, and under the direction of BAFTA award-winning director Noreen Kershaw, it stars Andrew Lancel as English teacher Dave Titswell in a world that is changing both inside and outside of his treasured classroom. Delivered over five segued acts, we humorously contemplate Dave’s lessons in life, garnered from his twenty five years in the teaching profession, as he is faced with the conundrum of whether he has now reached the end of the line or if a school trip to the Lakes will change things for the better. With liberal doses of good humour throughout, what we discover on the way as we navigate his overzealou...
Judy and Liza – Liverpool Theatre Festival
North West

Judy and Liza – Liverpool Theatre Festival

The glamour and glitz of Vaudeville brought joy in a derelict church in Liverpool on an Autumn evening. Judy and Liza is a musical homage and biopic of these giants of the big screen and stage Judy Garland, played by Helen Sheals (Mrs Wigan from Downton Abbey) and Liza Minnelli played by Emma Dears (West End singer/actress who also created the show). The show explores through songs, memories and anecdotes, the talents and turbulence of this mother and daughter relationship as they leaf through the family photo album. There is such a richness of songs between the two that the difficulty was which numbers to leave out. It starts with Garland’s childhood. She was born the youngest of three daughters to Frank and Ethel Gumm, who had their own movie theatre and were keen to introduce t...