JB Priestley’s classic runabout comedy When We Are Married is at West Yorkshire Playhouse this month. Produced by Northern Broadsides and directed by Barrie Rutter, this colourful revival of a celebrated farce sings with Yorkshire warmth and bawdy cheekiness.
The story is a simple one. The year is 1908 and three well-to-do couples are celebrating their joint 25th wedding anniversaries. Over-indulgence is the order of the evening until the chapel organ player drops a shattering bombshell. Due to a ecumenical technicality, the couples were never officially certified as married; they have essentially been living in sin for twenty five years...
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In the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birth, West Yorkshire Playhouse presents a season of contemporary adaptations celebrating the Brontës' work. One of these reimaginings is Villette, an unusual science-fiction fable by Linda Marshall-Griffiths.
Lucy Snowe is a clone, a "descendant", who joins a scientific excavation to recover the remains of a woman who was once immune to a plague which is again threatening the world. As the scientific crew becomes a surrogate family, Lucy visualises her twin sisters as a fractured version of herself and begins to consolidates her identity through a romance. Sleuth is the first show to hit the Quarry stage this season. A co-production between West Yorkshire Playhouse and Nottingham Playhouse, Anthony Shaffer's classic cloak-and-dagger thriller is re-imagined under the direction of Giles Croft.
Miles Richardson stars as Andrew Wyke, a scheming writer who stages a crime to ensnare his ex-wife's lover. James Alexanrous plays Milo Tindle, the cad tempted into an insurance swindle which becomes a devious game of cat and mouse - and murder. The Performance Ensemble and West Yorkshire Playhouse co-present Anniversary this month on the Courtyard stage. A collection of recollections expressed through movement, monologue and music, the play is performed by a cast aged 55 to 80 with a Dementia-friendly awareness for audiences.
The cast is composed of a collection of artists whose background in theatre ranges between several decades and several months, providing a vast scale of experience. What some of the performers may lack in formal training they make up for in charisma with a tender and tangible onstage honesty. Anniversaries of travel, separation, denial and death punctuate a showcase of ideas performed with a rare naturalism and pride. There is no set to speak of, the characters are real people, the memories true and painful, the laughter real. Theatre Royal Bath Productions has revived Relatively Speaking, Alan Ayckbourn's celebrated comedy, which is at Leeds Grand Theatre this week.
When Greg proposes to Ginny, he decides to secretly visit her parents for the first time. Following an address on the back of a cigarette packet, he finds his way to their home the break the good news. The problem is the address isn't that of her parents, rather the cosy detached home of his fiancée’s ex-flame Philip and his house proud wife Sheila. Celebrating the music of The Beatles, Let It Be pulls into Leeds Grand Theatre this month. Tracing the beginnings of the Fab Four in Liverpool's Cavern Club to huge stadiums in the USA and beyond, the concert musical offers a host of classic hits from the band which helped shape popular music and defined a generation.
Let It Be tells the story of The Beatles through the songs which made the band a global phenomenon. Rattling through musical numbers at a breathless pace, the show covers a decade of hits in just over two hours, occasionally trimming numbers to provide a wealth of coverage. This month for one week only, The Classic Thriller Theatre Company presents Rehearsal For Murder at Leeds Grand Theatre, as part of a national tour.
Set within a West End playhouse in 1989, tenacious director-writer Alex Dennison mourns the anniversary of his fiancee's apparent murder. Desperate to find the killer, Dennison reunites the cast of a fateful production, forcing the actors to re-enact the scene of the crime to unveil the murderer. If the plot sounds like an early episode of Columbo then there's good reason. David Rogers' adaptation comes from a 1982 teleplay by crime authors Richard Levinson and William Link, best known for co-creating Murder She Wrote, Columbo and Scene of the Crime. Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats pounces into Leeds Grand Theatre this week as part of a national tour. Following a revived engagement at the London Palladium, the record-breaking musical is back; offering its trove of iconic songs and magical dance routines with a few unique upgrades.
This month, Chichester Festival Theatre brings its new production of Guys and Dolls to the Leeds Grand. Opening on Broadway in 1950, the musical ran for over a thousand performances, winning a Tony Award before being developed into a legendary movie starring Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. Featuring a host of instantly recognisable musical numbers such as Luck Be a Lady, this new staging promises audiences a nostalgic, uplifting experience.
Guys and Dolls tells the colourful story of the prohibition era in New York. Alcohol and gambling is outlawed and petty crime rules the streets. Secret bars are rife and a subculture of men gamble with dice in the sewers. Above ground the drum-thumping Save-a-Soul Mission attempts to turn sinners to the light, led by the pious and beautiful Sarah Brown. Sky Masterson, a habitually slick gambler, accepts a wager to whisk a doll off to Havana and Sarah Brown becomes the mark. What begins as a bet soon blossoms into something else entirely different… Musical adaptations of hit movies are a trend which seem to remain ever-popular. One of the latest is The Bodyguard, a big-budget staging of the 1992 movie sensation which swept Whitney Houston from popstar to global icon. This month, Alexandra Burke of The X-Factor fame takes on the role of Rachel Marron, as the musical stops of at Leeds Grand Theatre.
The plot couldn't be simpler: When superstar singer Rachel is subject to death threats from a mysterious stalker, Bodyguard Frank (Stuart Reid) is hired to protect the headstrong performer. Soon their tetchy relationship blooms into an awkward romance, with Frank choosing to make the ultimate sacrifice. edit. |
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