Music: Manchester Concert Orchestra  Composers: Cole Porter, Irvin Berlin, Harry Warren, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein ll, Jerry Leiber, Lionel Bart, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Richard Rogers, Lorenz Hart Director: Nikki Woollaston Choreographer: Nikki Woollaston Reviewer: Sue Collier Anton and Erin is a musical extravaganza featuring the delightful dance partnership of Anton Du Beke and Erin Boag. The two dancers first ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Conrad Nelson Designer: Lis Evans Musical Director: Rebekah Hughes Reviewer: Ron Simpson If you’re going to update Shakespeare, then it needs thinking through – costumes and hair-styles are not enough – and Northern Broadsides’ transference of Much Ado about Nothing to somewhere in England at the end of World War Two is a complete and highly ...

Writer: Chinonyerem Odimba Director: Dawn Walton Designer: Simon Kenny Reviewer: Ron Simpson Mention the phrase “bus boycott” and the mind turns immediately to Montgomery, Alabama. The Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 is a largely forgotten milestone in race relations in this country. The cause of the boycott was a refusal by Bristol’s bus company to employ black or Asian bus ...

Choreography, Direction & Scenario: Cathy Marston Dramaturgy & Scenario: Uzma Hameed Music: Philip Feeney Reviewer: Beverley Haigh Queen Victoria is most notably recognised as an iconic elderly lady who spent most of her life in mourning for her late husband Albert. Previously the longest-serving monarch in British history until Elizabeth II stole her great-great-grandmother’s crown in 2015. In celebration of ...

Writer: Angela Carter Adapted by: Emma Rice Director: Emma Rice Designer: Vicki Mortimer Composer/Musical Director: Ian Ross Reviewer: Ron Simpson Wise Children is the name of a new theatre company founded by Emma Rice, after her long tenure of the role of Artistic Director of Kneehigh and her rather shorter stay at Shakespeare’s Globe. Wise Children is also the name ...

Writers/Directors: Andrew Quick and Pete Brooks Music: Jeremy Peyton Jones Reviewer: Ron Simpson There are many problems when adapting a novel as a stage play, from length to numbers of characters, from reproducing or rejecting the original setting to finding a modern dramatic equivalent, to the author’s narrative style. So distant have some recent versions been that they are best ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Amy Leach Reviewer: Jay Nuttall The play is the thing in Amy Leach’s solid production of Hamlet, as Leeds Playhouse’s ensemble season continues in their pop-up space while the theatre continues redevelopment. This radically cut-down, easily digestible version of Shakespeare’s masterpiece places story first and foremost and injects a pace that can very often be the ...

Writer: Irvine Welsh, adapted by Harry Gibson Director: Adam Spreadbury-Maher Reviewer: Chris Collett Back in the 1990s, there emerged a new generation of playwrights who seemed intent on shocking middle England and outraging the Daily Mail, with expletive-laden dialogue, and graphic depictions of sex and violence. Alongside the likes of Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F**king, one ...