North West Archives - Page 9 of 128

12Jul

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

Rumours – Thingwall Community Centre

Under the capable direction of Paul Arends, Thingwall Players excel in their Anglified delivery of one of Neil Simon’s most farcical of plays where the humour comes thick and fast and the only risk of missing a gag is that you’re still in fits of laughter from the previous one. This 1980’s tale reset to London involves a 10th wedding anniversary party to which the first couple, the Bevans (Charlotte Holguin; Zoran Blackie) arrive only to find the wife and servants missing and the husband doped up on painkillers with a gunshot wound through one of his earlobes. Desperate to avoid any scandal for the wounded man, who happens to be the assistant deputy minister of finance, the first couple, both lawyers, try to cover up the incident from the second couple, the Cummings (Kate Mulvi...

Amy Webber: No Previous Experience – The King’s Arms

12Jul

By Brian MaddenNo Comments

North West

Amy Webber: No Previous Experience – The King’s Arms

Ambitious opera graduate Amy Webber brings a delightful blend of music, role-play, and a hint of job-hunting to the King’s Arms theatre with her stand-up routine. Webber opens with a playful sing-through of her CV, interspersed with anecdotes that keep the audience laughing throughout. Her ad-libbed lyrics and charming fumbles on her mini keyboard are reminiscent of a genre-bending act you’d see at Eurovision, mixing humour and talent seamlessly. With an energetic and quick-witted persona, Webber enacts various occupations, from teacher to therapist, and engages in tongue-in-cheek audience interaction. Among the interesting careers in the audience were an engineer and a skyscraper window cleaner, to whom she offered some frivolous networking pointers. A humorous stint with a volu...

To Watch A Man Eat – Shakespeare North Playhouse

11Jul

By Louise KershawNo Comments

North West

To Watch A Man Eat – Shakespeare North Playhouse

One of the things I love about reviewing theatre is the wide variety of productions you get to see, and the many evenings spent engaged with the artistic endeavour of others. Rarely is it boring, usually it’s very engaging and occasionally, if you are lucky, something blows you away and you think ‘I am so glad I got to see that’. Last night, as part of the Heading North Fringe Festival at Shakespeare North Playhouse, the latter was my experience. Full Frontal Theatre’s To Watch A Man Eat is a powerful, dynamic, mesmerizingly brutal piece of theatre which explores desire, control and ambition in a sharply funny and intelligently observed narrative. Presented throughout as direct narration to audience we initially meet Micky (George Usher) who recounts the story of serial monogamist Je...

Chris Tavener is Faking Cool – The King’s Arms, Salford

11Jul

By Scot CunninghamNo Comments

North West

Chris Tavener is Faking Cool – The King’s Arms, Salford

Armed with debonair wit and a trusty guitar, singer-songwriter Chris Tavener - no stranger to a gig - invites us into The King’s Arms to convince another of his audiences that he’s cooler than cool. Threatening to blow his cover, though, are those discordant, intrusive thoughts. It’s immediately made clear just how well Tavener knows his way around a guitar: he plays with instinctive confidence, continuously filling the space with foot-tapping riffs and melodies. His doubting inner voice plays out loud between songs, enabling the audience to hear the anxious musings that contrast Tavener’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics. This largely successful comedic device could be further deployed by using it to string a narrative; as implied by the title, the perceptibly-cool exterior battling with an i...

9Jul

By Mary FoggNo Comments

North West

The Brit Fest – Ashley Hall Showground

One for all the family, The Brit Fest is jam packed with musical legends, fun activities, creative workshops, delicious food - and all with a wonderful summertime ambience! It felt like only a short time ago that The Brit Fest, sponsored and powered by Myerson Solicitors was announced, a festival to celebrate world-class music and local communities coming together as an exciting summer festival to get in the calendar! Now those summer dates that many had been looking forward to had arrived! The 5th, 6th, 7th July 2024 would see the first The Brit Fest staged at Ashley Hall & Showground in Cheshire and only a mile away from the picturesque village of Hale. The family friendly event hosted by radio presenters Jenny Powell and Mike Toolan, had a top-class line up of acts that included ...

8Jul

By Karen Morley-ChesworthNo Comments

North West

Brassed Off – Theatre by the Lake

Music is a universal language, and it has been at the heart of many working class, Northern communities for generations. And audiences at Theatre by the Lake get the privilege this month of hearing and feeling how brass band music welded people together, gave them strength and pride. The stage adaptation of the hit film Brassed Off blasts into the Keswick theatre and touches the soul. The actors who have come together for this production, in association with the Octagon Theatre Bolton, and Stephen Joseph Theatre, are more than triple threats, they are triplet blowing brass players, who blend seamlessly in with local bans people from Penrith Town Band. The bandsmen and women give a great musical and acting performance in this production. The story of the ballot on whether to tak...

6Jul

By Louise KershawNo Comments

North West

Natter – The Edge, Chorlton

My first trip out reviewing shows taking part in the Greater Manchester Fringe 2024 found me at The Edge in Chorlton to see Queerdog Theatre’s Natter. Set in 1980’s Salford, we follow the story of friends and confidantes, Helen and Linda, as they regularly meet up to watch TV, drink tea with biscuits, put the world to rights and share each other’s worries and woes. Presented very much in the vein of Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s classic Lancashire matriarchs, they sit head scarfed and heavily busted in front of the telly enjoying Countdown, Neighbours, The Bill and Bullseye, to name but a few. They gossip, they judge, they bathe in denial, initially avoiding the elephant in the room, the subject of Linda’s gay son, then march through with the herd as they tackle the intri...

3Jul

By Peter RuddickNo Comments

North West

Boyography – Social Refuge, Manchester

The marketing and pre-show announcements for Boyography promise a unique story about queer love and fluid sexuality in a “post-gay world”. The reality is a lot more commonplace. It starts promisingly. When two boys bump into each other in a school corridor something unspoken and powerful is sparked. The locker room encounter between Oliver (Isaac Radmore) and Jake (George Bellamy) feels inevitable, but Oliver’s reaction is a lot more surprising. Experience would tell an audience that the cocksure and laddish one in a relationship like this would be closeted and outwardly homophobic. Far from it. Oliver has a girlfriend, but he also happily sleeps with boys. It is just sex. After all, “bodies are bodies”. Sadly, the intensely modern idea of young men without doubt who reject la...

Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience – Exhibition Centre Liverpool

27Jun

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience – Exhibition Centre Liverpool

Billed as the UK premiere, Annerin Productions’ Beyond Van Gogh arrives in Liverpool as an immersive experience of over 300 masterpieces including three more renowned images – The Starry Night; Sunflowers; and Café Terrace at Night. As much as I enjoy art, Liverpool’s Exhibition Centre isn’t a curated gallery – nor does it claim to be – and equally the event itself is clear that this is very much about artwork freed from its frames rather than any original pieces, so any assessment is based two-fold on the experience itself and the extent to which it enlightens its audience, serving as an introduction to art. There is a winding route from entrance which sets out a simplified backstory to Van Gogh with a hint of his work in the background, designed as an appetiser to the main event wh...

Windrush Warriors – International Anthony Burgess Foundation

26Jun

By Peter RuddickNo Comments

North West

Windrush Warriors – International Anthony Burgess Foundation

When the Windrush scandal began to emerge, the plight of the victims struck a chord because an injustice was being served on people who had already faced discrimination, despite giving so much to the country. Windrush Warriors focuses, not on the scandal itself, but on the real lives of those victims. It is touching, occasionally emotional and very funny. Just like the beautiful Windrush generation themselves. Sister Johnson (Jennifer Marvaree-Robinson) arrives at the local community centre in distress, worried she may face deportation. She finds a, largely, sympathetic audience in her fellow pensioner pals from the West Indies and the quartet decide to organise a fightback. What follows are a set of Vicar of Dibley parish council meeting-like conversations as the self-titled Win...