Stephen Collins Archives - North West End UK

Perfect Show For Rachel – The Crucible Playhouse

20Feb

By Nathan DunnNo Comments

Yorkshire & Humber

Perfect Show For Rachel – The Crucible Playhouse

Zoo Co (co-produced with Improbable) brought ‘Perfect Show for Rachel’ to The Crucible Theatre Playhouse this week, and what a delight it is to have this production on Sheffield stages this February. The show is a beautiful evening of unrestrained creative exploration and recreation. As we enter the full cast are on stage, very relaxed and smiley as they allow the audience to filter into their pastel coloured living room stage space. An electronic drum-kit, piano and guitar stand upon a small raised area. Rachel O’Mahoney is the director, the all seeing eye, the creative arbiter and final say of this show. She sits behind a large desk adorned with dozens (some 40+) buttons. Her art adorns the walls, and her face is live streamed to a couple TVs attached to a colourful set evoking recrea...

A Christmas Carol – Leeds Playhouse

The festive extravaganzas at Leeds Playhouse have become a must see for Yorkshire theatre fans, and this year for A Christmas Carol they have thrown their big guns at yet another version of this hoary old favourite. This is director Amy Leach’s fifth go at Dickens’ classic tale of a damaged man’s redemptive journey, and it’s her biggest yet. She joins forces for the 22nd time with set and costume designer Hayley Grindle as they cleverly move the action from Victorian London to the cotton mills of Leeds. That works really well as it’s a reminder this great city’s wealth was also built on ruthlessly exploiting the working class. Unusually for a Playhouse festive show we are not in the round on the huge Quarry stage. Leach’s typically dynamic and witty direction makes the most of Grindl...

A Christmas Carol – Leeds Playhouse At Home

The Playhouse’s annual festive spectacular was just one of hundreds of productions forced to switch online just before curtain was about to go up and as good as this recorded version is it will always lack the yuletide magic of gathering in a shared space. This is a reworking of a production that began at Hull Truck Theatre, going on to be a big hit last year when the theatre’s ensemble brought it to life in the pop-up theatre used when the Playhouse was refurbed. The Playhouse’s associate director Amy Leach cleverly invokes the legend that every theatre has a ghost, but she deploys a team of them as they emerge from their offstage pods. They have gathered round the traditional ghost light that burns when a theatre is dark, and once they discover a puppet of Tiny Tim they decide to d...