Author: The Reviews Hub - Yorkshire & North East

Ramps on the Moon is a group of venues around the UK that creates space for deaf, neurodiverse, disabled and non-disabled performers and creatives to work together. Each venue takes its turn to produce a show and it is the turn of Sheffield Theatres. For their production, as their 50th anniversary celebrations for the Crucible, they have chosen to put on Much Ado About Nothing. Much Ado About Nothing is a classic Shakespearean comedy with love triangles, misunderstanding and plenty laughs. The show is long at three hours in running time but it doesn’t drag too much. Robert Hastie directs…

Writer: Oscar Wilde Director: Denzel Westley-Sanderson In a very sensible and modest interview in the programme director Denzel Westley-Sanderson is, naturally, asked about the play, but omits one thing from his answers: it is nearly impossible to stage The Importance of Being Earnest in any way that is not very, very funny. Those of us who saw Lady Bracknell enter dressed as a Valkyrie at Harrogate some 25 years ago will vouch for that. So an intelligently realised production for ETT, with all the parts played by black actors, falls down by trying too hard to be funny. It is…

Writer and Director: Alan Ayckbourn For Family Album, his 87th play, Alan Ayckbourn plays tricks with time and space. The setting is 27 Byfield Crescent, SW19, between the years of 1952 and 2022, incorporating three scenes, moving in, moving out and a chaotic birthday party in 1992. The events of all three recur, overlap and pattern themselves so they ultimately all inform each other. The living room is marked out with illuminated lines, different colours for different periods, with white for those indeterminate times when two or more periods occur simultaneously. In the beginning two long-suffering removal men fill the…

Music and Lyrics: Bob Dylan Writer and Director: Conor McPherson You can hardly describe Bob Dylan as a musicals musician but this is the 2nd show to feature his songs using the triple threat treatment. The trippy dream-like Times They Are a Changin’ closed after only 28 Broadway performances. Not your typical jukebox musical, Girl From the North Country eschews the conventional musical bling, proving all that glitters isn’t gold. When the tour was announced this critic was anxious to see it given the success and critical acclaim on its first outing at the Noel Coward Theatre in London –…

The Freedom Festival, running from August 24 to September 4, has enough in it to fill a 76-page programme. Most of the events, exhibitions, installations, physical theatre and dance (plus several memorably classified as “undefinable”), take place in various locations throughout the city, but Hull Truck Theatre was used for half a dozen performances. The Little Things by La Mecanica from Mallorca proved to be clever and playful. A bare stage except for a couple of blocks illuminated with pale blue light was home to four performers (two of each gender) dancing cheerfully until one peeled off to receive a…

Music Director: James Pearson To celebrate its 60th anniversary, Ronnie Scott’s in London is taking to the road, with a mix of old film and photographs and a live five-piece band. The narration is decidedly scrappy, though there are some fine pics, but the jazz is excellent, so who cares? We begin by seeing Ronnie Scott himself in action, welcoming the audience with those insulting witticisms that brought the crowds in. Then James Pearson, the club’s musical director, sits himself at the piano with Sam Burgess (bass) and Chris Hickinbottom (drums), introduces his first “guest” and we’re away with a…

Creators: Sarah Gomes Harris and Tim O’Sullivan MEI Theatrical’s thoroughly engaging version of Sarah Gomes Harris and Tim O’Sullivan’s CBeebies characters begins with five likeable (and, as it proves, very energetic) youngsters singing a song about the weather – very appropriate too, since the weather will play a recurrent part in Sarah and Duck’s Big Top Birthday. The play, just completing a six-week tour, offers an hour of delight to 4-6 year olds and a very pleasant diversion to those somewhat older. The narrator is there, as on television, rather detached and inclined to take credit where it’s not due,…

Composer: George Frideric Handel Director: Laura Attridge Conductor: Ellie Slorach One of the nice things about Leeds Opera Festival is that you never know what’s coming up, just that it will be worth watching and pretty obscure. Between last year’s Gustave Holst fest and next year’s Latin American fiesta we have a study of power. A free performance of Krenek’s The Dictator at the Holbeck and assorted performances of a new music theatre piece aside, the main focus of interest was three performances of Handel’s Silla at Leeds School of Arts. There is little record of performances of Silla in…