Throughout December the 22,000sq m exhibition space has been transformed into an indoor theme park with more than 50 family rides. The space is aimed mainly at younger children with mini versions of many popular adult rides, as well as the fun house, inflatables and even a beach to play on.

And there is something for teenagers too, including dodgems, waltzer and gravity wheel. Once inside the ticket price includes the rides and you can see little ones’ eyes widen as they decide which ride to try out next.

The price also includes a number of shows that are on at various points in the day. This year on the main stage in the centre there are short performances themed on Star Wars, where youngsters can try out their Jedi skills, and Frozen, with songs from the film. There is also mini-pantomime, The Wizard of Oz, packed with tunes and a big top circus, which we highly recommend. It is a real treat to see the skill of the circus performers so close-up. There is juggling, clowning, acrobatics and silks, all done with an original twist to an upbeat soundtrack, and ending on a Christmas theme to leave everyone in the festive spirit.

For an additional cost there are some traditional funfair game stalls such a hook a duck and amusement water-shooting games as well as a variety of food and refreshment stands.

Included in the price is a meet and greet with Santa and his Elves complete with a visit to the real reindeer in the adjacent stables (a toy from Santa’s workshop is extra). Judging by the reaction of youngsters at the opening night, spending more time at Winter Wonderland is likely to be high on this year’s the Christmas list.

Silcock’s Winter Wonderland Manchester is at Event City from 4 December 2021 until 2 January 2022.

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Now it has been revoiced in English, with Mia Ciscon as Conni joined by a largely Irish cast, for UK cinema release.

In this gentle adventure, Conni takes a three-day school trip to an old castle, where she will be staying away from home for the first time. But while the idea of the trip is exciting, Conni is sad at not being able to take her best friend, Mau the cat with her.

It seems that Mau feels the same way at the thought of being parted from her mischievous chum, because no sooner does the bus arrive than Mau finds a way of sneaking on board and joining the fun.

There is confusion and chaos as the pair are reunited. And while Conni is happy to see her cheeky friend, she knows there could be trouble ahead. The castle’s owner, Ms. Weingartner is allergic to cats and forbids all pets on her property. What will happen if she finds Mau? As Conni would say: ‘Oh Shrubbery Plants and Timbuktu!’

Conni and her friends try to hide Mau from Ms. Weingartner and the teachers, but Mau is oblivious to the danger and carries on creating mayhem as usual. Eggs are broken, cakes are eaten, things go bump in the night, and guests’ belongings start to go missing. It’s all too much for Ms. Weingartner who quickly jumps to the conclusion that it is her son’s raccoon Oskar who is to blame and plans to banish him to a petting zoo.

The detective skills of Conni and her friends are needed to save Oskar, keep Mau safe, brave the castle’s ghostly noises, and find the real thief.

The animations look a bit dated, but the story has all the ingredients for a fun-filled adventure where children know more than the adults, are braver, and support each other to save the day.

Conni and the Cat will be in UK cinemas from 20 August 2021.

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His 2011 book for young adults has sold over a million copies and garnered huge critical acclaim, including an unprecedented double win of the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals for outstanding children’s literature and illustration.

It tells the story of Conor, a 13-year-old boy who knows his mother is seriously ill, and whose fear grows when no-one will really talk to him about it. Late one night, a monster pays him a visit: the enormous, ancient yew tree in his garden comes ferociously to life, and begins to tell Conor a series of harsh fables.

Exploring themes of family, grief, hidden emotions, truth, complex lives, bereavement and friendship, the monster’s tales ultimately help Conor face the truth of his situation.

Taking these same themes as inspiration, the Monster Writing Challenge is for young people aged 10-25 to tell a short story of their own. Entries must be no more than 500 words and selected stories will be narrated by members of the cast in a series of videos posted up on the production’s social media channels.

The deadline for submissions in the North West is 20 February, ahead of the show’s run at The Lowry from 25-29 February. For more details visit A Monster Calls website and download an information pack.

Hear how director Sally Cookson brought the book to life in her Olivier Award-winning production now on its first UK tour.

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We’ve been months in the waiting – The Lowry is the final stop on a tour running since January. However, such is the pull of Julia Donaldson’s stories that my little theatre buddy’s enthusiasm hasn’t waned in the slightest.

I did wonder if such anticipation could lead to a let-down. I needn’t have worried. We’ve seen many of Donaldson’s other books staged and this production is by far the best.

There are so many reasons for this. First is the staging, designed in consultation with Lydia Monks, who drew the original illustrations for the book. The bold colours and familiar outlines are striking, creating an instant feel we’re entering the world of a picture book.

A delight of the book is the fun of using your imagination and Monks provides plenty of opportunity for that here too, with inventive use of props creating some brilliant participatory scenes in which many of the farmyard characters are brought to life. An old bicycle, a tin bath and a bit of rope become the handsome horse. A sheep-skin rug, a wheel-barrow, and a rugby ball become the woolly sheep; and a few rough brushes become the dainty dog. Of course, the welcoming, big eyes provide the finishing touch to make these cartoon-like characters spring into life.

Another huge strength is the lively music from JollyGoodTunes, which runs through the whole show, making it in essence, a mini-musical. It’s a mix of recorded and live tunes, with the cast playing a variety of instruments including flute, guitar, violin and penny whistle. It’s wonderfully upbeat and has the audience spontaneously joining in with its catchy rhythm and animal sound lyrics.

The four-strong cast are terrific too. Their performances are polished and energetic. They bounce easily off the audience and the audience in return bounce eagerly back. And what great voices too, particularly Emma Breton (Farmer).

Emma Carroll is beautiful on the flute attracting the little Ladybird, who darts about like a sparky fire-fly on stage. Benedict Hastings’ Lanky Len, with his Daffy Duck voices is a definite crowd-pleaser. In the production we saw, understudy Will Steele stood in as Hefty Hugh. His antics with Lanky Len as the two hapless burglars, who plan to steal the farmer’s prize cow, make for some fantastic comic moments.

It is here that Donaldson’s story comes fully alive on stage –  the directions of the villains’ plan and the Ladybird’s idea to foil it become a comic stalking round the duck pond. We all know what’s going to happen, but Steele and Hastings hook us in all the same.

The 55 minutes whizzes by, then there’s a quick audience participation song before the farmer and friends are away, leaving us all smiling and singing on the way home. For a summer treat you couldn’t hope for a sunnier children’s show.

Kenny Wax Family Entertainment in association with Matthew Gregory’s production of What The Ladybird Heard Live on stage is at The Lowry from 1 – 26 August. Visit website for details.

To find out more watch the trailer below and read our interview with Julia Donaldson.

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Tall Stories, whose previous productions at the Lowry include Donaldson’s The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom, are masters at it.

In all adaptations there’s a magical element of childhood imagination, but it is quite a challenge for any company to present an animated tale of a friendship between a giant whale and the tiny snail, who saves his life.

To get around this, Tall Stories tell the story through the eyes of a Royal Navy father (Tim Hibberd), who doubles as the whale, and his adventurous daughter (Hannah Miller), who is also the snail. Inspired by the work of Storybook Soldiers, who help British military personnel serving abroad to record bedtime story CDs for their children back home, Tall Stories have created a multi-layered narrative that sees the daughter as a grown-up (viola player, Rachel Benson) looking back at the fun times spent with her dad, building dens and creating great whales out of pieces of furniture.

It’s also a helluva ride. Hibberd and Miller get the audience involved from the very start, moving through the stalls, playing a panto-style hide-and-seek that causes shrieks of ‘She’s behind you’.

The original story remains central, with its ninja crabs, gawking penguins, hero fire-fighters and a super-soaker splattering across the auditorium as the beached whale gets saved.

There’s plenty of audience participation, with sing-a-longs and even an entertaining maths lesson.

As the dad says: ‘A good story can take you all around the world, without even leaving your room.’ By the end of the hour we’ve ridden an enormous wave of story-telling and are hungry for more tales, more adventure, more fun and more precious time with our little ones before they grow-up.

The Snail and the Whale is at the Lowry from 30 May to 3 June 2018.

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Today most people know his famous characters, Mowgli, Baloo and Shere Khan, from the Disney adaptations – a cartoon musical in 1967 and more recently an astonishingly realistic, computer graphic version in 2016.

To produce a stage version to meet the expectations set by the big screen is a mountainous task. Yet, with a strong story to tell you can’t underestimate the power of a live performance to captivate young minds. Focused on the stage – a mass of hanging ladders and ropes to create a dense jungle canopy – it’s like they’ve all been hypnotized by python, Kaa.

To create the show, writer, Jessica Swale has gone back to the original 1894 book and used two stories from which to weave her narrative. The strength of the stories comes from their rich box of characters,and Swale keeps them recognizable while stretching some aspects for a 21^st century audience.

Shere Khan the Tiger (Lloyd Gorman) makes for a greasy villain, dressed in a leather biker suit, slashed with orange flecks and matching streak through his hair. Deborah Oyelade delivers a sassy, Black Panther keeping perfect poise in a black velvet jump suit. Rachel Dawson gives a comical turn as Kaa, grumbling about ageing as she sheds her skin. While joker Baloo, here a playful Welshman (Dyfrig Morris) is as loveable as ever, with ‘a heart as big as the sun’.

 Perhaps the biggest change is giving the part of Mowgli to a woman, Keziah Joseph, whose slight frame, delicate features and pure tone of voice make her believable as a child.

 Swale has refocused the story to celebrate diversity. The story, with all the different animals living in harmony, presents a fantastic opportunity for this. For the most part this works well, but it feels occasionally that the issue has been allowed to overtake the story, becoming overly-wordy and preachy, in a jumble of references to gender, sexuality, race and disability.

 If this sounds a little too serious for families hoping for a bit of Bare Necessities uplift, Joe Stilgoe’s sunny tunes help keep it upbeat. In many ways this is a play with music rather than a musical, but the live music, embracing a rich mix of styles from across the globe, is a central strength of the show.

The tunes carry along what is essentially a joyful story of family, friendship and oneness under the same sun – and that’s a beat everyone can dance to.

The Jungle Book is at The Lowry from 2-6 May 2018.

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At the Lowry last year, we saw on the same Quay’s stage Belgrade Theatre Coventry’s magical version of the classic Fellini film, La Strada, nominated in the 2018 MTA awards. Metta use similar integrated story-telling using circus tricks, actor-musicians and song to support and add dimension to its central fairy-tale narrative.

As with all adaptations, there is room for interpretation in the story and Metta’s version is neither as upbeat and cheerful as the Disney animation nor as dark as the original Hans Christian Anderson tale, where the mermaid heroine is dissolved into sea foam.

The strength of this production is the narrative it chooses to tell never loses focus, remaining central to everything around it, even when that something is a woman playing a violin while swinging upside-down on a hoop.

For those new to the story, in its simplest form it tells the tale of a young mermaid who saves a man from a shipwreck and wins his heart. Here circus skills are used to stunning effect to create a world of under-water weightlessness as the cast, dressed in brightly-coloured swim-suits, footless tights and retro-flower swimming-caps, somersault, dive and rotate along the sea-floor on a huge cyr wheel. Juggling in dimmed-light with fluorescent balls becomes dancing glow-worms, and crouching bodies become a living coral-reef.

There is a bit of panto-style gender-bending with the Seawitch being played by a towering male, Josh Frazer, who also gives a Les Ballets Trockadero style performance during the Palace Ball scene. And the metaphorical dizziness of falling-in-love is given physical form in a swinging duet.

It is a sophisticated family show with a genuine wow-factor for little eyes.

The six-year-old critic with me said: ‘I liked the singing and the sea-horse that looked like a trumpet, but I can’t say a favourite bit because I loved it all.’

The Little Mermaid is at The Lowry from 10-14 April 2018.

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Now, aged 19, she is the star of a new children’s Christmas show from Salford-based company, Colour the Clouds, the first festive show commissioned by the Lowry as part of its Associate Artist’s programme.

It’s a big leap from singing live to fronting a stage show, especially in front of an audience of little kids, who if they aren’t interested soon let you know with their fidgeting and chatter.

Thankfully Hollie captivates the youngsters from the off, maintaining a child-like enthusiasm and broad smile. She’s also believable as a schoolgirl and the audience quickly buy in to her adventure as she strives to cheer up her grumpy, old dad and save Christmas.

The story starts with the darkness of many fairy tales – young Holly Christmas lives with her miserable Dad, who tells her there are no special days of the year, not even Christmas day. One day she comes across a magical book of extraordinary tales. Normally her dad (Richard De Winter) wouldn’t let her read such stories, but when he looks at the book it appears she’s reading about napkin folding, leaving Holly to continue her fantastical tale.

Holly reads about a grumpy king and recognises something of her dad in the character. In her search to find out how the story ends our young heroine is helped by two elves, Bob (Jack Alexander) and Sparks (Lorna Tinsley), to bring Christmas spirit back into her home.

The set is like a giant picture book, with a large projection screen at the back, which turns its pages to show various scenes from Holly’s sitting room to a silhouette puppet adventure of a young princess. The elves give a narration and the story unfolds with live music played by the cast, giving Hollie a chance to show us her voice is still as big as we remember.

After the excitement of Holly and the Elves, her dad’s song at the end probably may benefit from being a livelier tune or shorter to keep children’s attention. Sticking too rigidly to the ‘two is enough’ idea, also means there is no opportunity for some easy wins for children in terms of audience participation for a magic wish or a glimpse of Santa in the night sky.

For the most part though, the songs and magic tricks keep the energy high and in all it is a heart-warming new Christmas show that will hopefully still have life after Hollie is too grown-up to play the part.

The Extraordinary Tale of Holly Christmas is at The Lowry from 20-31 December 2017.

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Yet, when Olivia Jacobs and Toby Mitchell of Tall Stories theatre company first approached Julia and Axel about adapting their story for the stage, they were acting not on the hype we now see, but on the sheer delight of a story that has captured the imagination of little ones for almost 20 years.

Knowing how popular the story has become you could sceptically think any live version of The Gruffalo wouldn’t need to work hard to fill a theatre. However, since opening the show in 2001, Tall Stories hasn’t taken anything for granted. This isn’t simply recreating the story on stage, it is a child’s introduction to musical theatre, with the characters brought vividly to life through song.

The heart of the story is still very much the same – a Mouse takes a stroll through the deep dark wood in search of a tasty hazelnut, but instead finds a cunning Fox, a not-so-wise Owl and a slippery Snake. Tension comes as the young Mouse uses her imagination to conjure up a monstrous creature even more frightening than the predators she faces.

To save herself from becoming dinner, the Mouse comes up with the idea of a terrifying creature, the Gruffalo. But as the children in the audience shout back in unison: ‘There’s no such thing as a Gruffalo!’ Or, is there?

There are some lovely moments when Lauren Scott-Berry as Mouse gets all the children involved, inviting them to alternatively fill the auditorium with a loud roar and then to be quiet as a mouse.

Alastair Chisholm plays all three predators with comic panache and just enough menace to be a scary, but not too scary, villain. And when the Gruffalo (Aaron Millard) finally appears in a big colourful, floppy costume, the children are all fully absorbed ready to sing-a-long the catchy, ‘G-G-G-Gruffalo’.

Looking around at the smiling youngsters clapping along I wonder, could there be a more exciting introduction to theatre than this 55-minute adventure of magic, monsters and music?

The Gruffalo is at The Lowry from 6 December 2017 to 7 January 2018.

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Writer, Debbie Isitt knows how to pen a winner. Currently working on the fourth installment of her Nativity film series, it’s an idea showing no signs of slowing down. Considering its popularity, perhaps it’s surprising the story took so long to make it to the stage. Watching, however, it’s easy to see why a live version took so long.

The musical takes the story of the first film, two old drama school friends, now primary school teachers warring over who can direct the best Nativity. Andy Brady makes an entertaining pantomime villain out of Mr Shakespeare, leading the privileged kids at posh, Oakmoor Prep. Meanwhile, our Cinderella of the piece, Mr Maddens (Daniel Boys) is struggling at his Ofstead-failing school, St Bernadette’s, whose previous Nativity was panned by local Alan Carr style critic (Jamie Chapman).

Step in fairy godmother, Mr Poppy (Simon Lipkin), a manic teaching assistant whose energy and humour saves the day in every sense – rescuing the musical from schmaltz with his playground rap and slapstick pranks.

But this isn’t a show about the adults. This is a show for children about children. And it feels like Isitt, who also directs, has done a Mr Poppy – asked youngsters what they would like to see, then given them everything.

There is a lavish set with huge wrapped-presents, sparkling stars, flying youngsters, snow, coloured lights and gold streamers. Even the school yard has the attraction of a sweet shop, with fluorescent hula-hoops, skipping ropes and bright-blue footballs. The children near me had their faces pushed over the seats in front to get closer – it was magical to watch how well Isitt had cast her spell.

How Birimingham Rep found so many fantastic little actors, is another bit of magic to add the real Sparkle and Shine to this production. Heart-warming and hilarious – Debbie Isitt has another winner.

Nativity! The Musical is at the Palace Theatre, Manchester from 29 November to 3 December 2017. 

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