As Strictly Ballroom the Musical quicksteps into The Lowry on its first ever UK tour, it begs the question: what took it so long? It’s more than 30 years since Baz Luhrmann’s film version dazzled critics and audiences alike. And the ongoing TV...
The football metaphor was just too good to pass over, I suppose. And so it goes with Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial. As we enter the plush auditorium of The Lowry the crowing chants of a Saturday afternoon crowd can be heard pulsing from...
Many will fondly remember the 1989 film Steel Magnolias. At the time, its star-studded line-up read like the Who’s Who of women in Hollywood – Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Dolly Parton, Julia Roberts, Daryl Hannah, and Olympia Dukakis. It seemed...
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly continues to pull the crowds; partly, of course, because of the maestro’s music, but also because it is a simple, truthful story, based (albeit at some creative distance) upon real life events. The entire opera is set at...
When writer and director Isobel McArthur was commissioned to produce an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it came with a word of warning: make sure it connects with a Glasgow audience. The advice must have worked not only for a...
Author Neil Gaiman‘s work has been successfully brought to both the big screen (with the animation Coraline) and the small screen (Good Omens) and now this Joel Horwood adaptation of his fantasy novel of the same name arrives on the huge Lyric...
A tropical forest isn’t the setting you might imagine for a Christmas musical. But when temperatures are minus 7 outside, the idea of being transported to a lush green land, if only for a couple of hours is inviting. The adventure starts from first...
It does my Christmas spirit no good at all to be writing a less than warm review about a Maxine Peake project. The star of Dinner Ladies, Silk, and the rightly acclaimed post-Hillsborough docudrama, Anne (plus a glittering array of theatrical...
Outside of Shakespeare, there can be few literary works that have been reimagined more often than A Christmas Carol, and Octagon Theatre Bolton’s musical take is definitely one for families. Kate Ferguson and Susannah Pearse’s adaptation focusses on...
Opera North returns to the myth of Orpheus for a second night at The Lowry, but this time this ancient story takes on a whole new operatic form in a collaboration with South Asian Arts UK. In a ground-breaking exploration of musical styles this new...
Carmel Thomason
Dave Porter
Martin Thomasson
Paul Thomason
Georgina Wells