North West

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...

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...

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...

Last night I was back again to the Liverpool theatre festival at St Luke’s Church for another show entitled Music of the Night. A show full of some of the greatest musical numbers of all time. The show was sung by to performers Roy Locke who has starred in Phantom of the Opera in Australia and Germany. Joining him was Olivia Brereton who was in the recent Les Misérables tour and has played Christine in Phantom on the West End. From the off the singing was out of this world and in a cloudless night sky it was the perfect setting for this show. We learned about their careers and why they choose the songs. However, I found the set up of the show frustrating. They played music before the show to set the mood but half of the songs they played we heard again with them singing. I’m all ...

Rose is sitting shiva, participating in the Jewish tradition of mourning someone who has died and sharing stories about their life. And this particular death turns out to be tangled up with her story in a way that is really quite unexpected. As she sits, she shares snapshots from her own life that sometimes seem a little disconnected, as she wanders through the images in her memory, trying to separate the things that actually happened to her from the movies she has seen over the years and the stories she has been told; recognising that there are some things that she just doesn’t want to remember. Rose begins by talking about growing up in a Jewish village in Ukraine, her relationship with her parents and siblings, and the civil war and its consequences. She talks about following her bro...