Boff Whalley Archives - North West End UK

Red Ladder reprise all-female musical We’re Not Going Back

18Jan

By NewsdeskNo Comments

NEWS

Red Ladder reprise all-female musical We’re Not Going Back

Radical theatre company Red Ladder are reprising their all-female musical We’re Not Going Back that tells the story of women who played pivotal roles in the 1984/85 miners’ strike. The musical is being brought back after it was first staged a decade ago to mark the 40th anniversary of the great strike through the eyes of three very different sisters who are ultimately united by a common cause. Victoria Brazier, Claire-Marie O’Connor, Stacey Sampson and Beccy Owen are back in their original roles as sisters driven to take a pivotal role in the struggle to survive. Photo: Tim Smith Red Ladder aims to remind the audience of the resilience of working-class communities, and the power of sticking two fingers up to a government hell-bent on their destruction. It was originally crea...

Homebaked the Musical – Liverpool’s Royal Court

30Sep

By Blathine MaguireNo Comments

North West

Homebaked the Musical – Liverpool’s Royal Court

The doors of Liverpool’s much loved Royal Court Theatre are back open and tonight we witness a new show “Homebaked the Musical” which has been produced by Liverpool’s Royal Court alongside Red Ladder Theatre Company. Written by Boff Whalley, ‘Homebaked the Musical’, is a new piece of theatre based on the well-known bakery that borders Anfield and Everton. It celebrates the historic and heroic story of the Liverpool residents who fought to save their local bakery from demolition and evolves into a huge inspiring project that brings the whole community together. Boff Whalley has done a fantastic job in writing something funny, heart-warming and emotive. The music is both touching and humorous which blends perfectly into the script. I particularly enjoyed the choral sound of ‘we rise’, ...

Red Ladder are back with new show Homebaked – The Musical

7Apr

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

NEWS

Red Ladder are back with new show Homebaked – The Musical

Radical theatre company Red Ladder’s first post lockdown show is Homebaked – The Musical co-produced with Liverpool’s Royal Court. It’s a musical comedy based on Liverpool’s famous co-operative bakery inspired by the real-life group of local residents coming together to save their neighbourhood bakery - and their homes - from demolition. Back in 2012 the people of Anfield faced losing a huge slice of their local community to property developers. Things were looking bleak until a group of like-minded individuals got together to say ‘enough is enough’. They wanted a place for locals to earn a crust so they transformed a crumbling old bakery into Homebaked. What started with a half-baked idea rose and rose until it had spawned a thriving community business with plans to transform the...

Daniel Bye takes to the road with a new play about running and freedom

19Jan

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

Interviews

Daniel Bye takes to the road with a new play about running and freedom

Daniel Bye made his name with a series of challenging interactive works he wrote and appeared in, but now he’s teamed up with musician Boff Whalley to create These Hill Are Ours that’s nominally about their shared love of running. Daniel and the former Chumbawamba songwriter are also using songs and words to explore who should own the land they run on, and thanks to the virus they’ve been waiting for a year to perform it in front an audience. The idea began life when they were working together on projects around the country. “We go for a run from wherever we were out of the town, or city, towards the peak overlooking the place and that kind of grew into a project,” recalls Daniel about a work that developed as they put the hard miles in over the last three years. “But as we rep...

11Dec

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

NEWS

Boff and Daniel run away from it all

These Hills Are Ours written by writer-performer Daniel Bye and Chumbawamba’s Boff Whalley exploring their mutual love of running and freedom gets its world premiere at ARC Stockton in January. The pair also celebrates the freedom to roam wild places and asks both of them what they’re really running from. For the last three years Bye and Whalley have been running a series of routes, from the centre of any place they found themselves in up to the top of the peak overlooking that city. Daniel then took off on one epic journey travelling more than twice as far as he’s ever run before. In story and in song this is the story of what they found out - about the relationship between city and country, between wild and controlled, about land ownership, about why we’re drawn to wild places a...

14Jun

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

REVIEWS

These Hills Are Ours – Clougha Pike

Daniel Bye and Boff Whalley were just about to set off a national of their new show, These Hills Are Ours, exploring through stories and song the relationship between art and the great outdoors, but then the virus struck. So in lieu of those live shows they’ve been releasing a short series of videos where they take a small choir on a hike to the top of a hill singing a specially composed song on their journey to the peak. This time they’ve taken a trip from the nippy shores of Morecambe Bay through town and up some rugged paths to the top of Clougha Pike. This is a more political video as the choir tramp past Do Not Trespass signs as they sing: ‘It’s mine, but I don’t own it/and it makes me sort of sad/to know this land is parcelled and exchanged.’ Once again, the singers are a...