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Born Bernadette Lazzara in February 1948, New Yorker Bernadette Peters has become a byword for Broadway glamour. Starting her career at just 3 years old, Peters secured her Actors Equity Card aged 9.  Changing her surname from Lazzara to Peters to avoid typecasting, Bernadette appeared as one of the Hollywood Blondes in a national tour of Gypsy in 1961. In ...

On a side street in London’s West Hampstead, lies an anonymous building, its drab functionality belying its purpose, which is to create great art. The Reviews Hub’s Stephen Bates accepted an invitation to come here and visit the rehearsal rooms of English National Opera for a sneak preview of a major musical revival. A long walk down winding, narrow corridors ...

September 2019 will mark the fortieth anniversary of the death of Dame Gracie Fields, who rose from being a mill girl to becoming a Global superstar and a champion of the British working classes. Her down to earth persona earned her the affectionate nickname of ‘Our Gracie’, and as such she became the epitome of traditional British values and beliefs. ...

The INK Festival 2019 goes from strength to strength with 2019 providing a bumper crop of emerging talent and established professionals alike. Creatives both young and old cover a range of performing arts that will excite and provoke the three-day festival going audience. The range of plays is impressive, over forty of them, by writers that all have a connection ...

Writer and Director:  Keith Behrman Reviewer:  Richard Maguire There’s no shortage of coming-out films, but they are still necessary, especially when there’s a revival of right-wing thinking across the world. However, Giant Little Ones, a Canadian film showing at BFI Flare, London’s LGBTQ+ film festival, is not a straightforward coming-out film. It could be argued that it’s not a coming-out ...

God walks onto the stage and instantly the audience erupts into deafening applause and the ovation continues. The sold-out Olivier Theatre is filled with his greatest fans and admirers, all of whom snapped up tickets within hours of the interview being announced only three days before. God subtly pushes at the air with his downward-facing palms and an excited hush ...

Writer and Director:  Vincente Alves do Ó Reviewer:  Richard Maguire Portuguese film Sunburn really split the critics at its press screening this week at the BFI Flare Festival, London’s biggest LGBTQ+ film festival. Some walked out while others kept glancing at their watches. After the film, those who had stayed were trying to extol Sunburn’s virtues to those who had threatened ...

Writers: Eileen Atkins with Chanya Button Director: Chanya Button Reviewer:  Richard Maguire Opening this year’s Flare, London’s biggest LGBTQ+ film festival, is Vita and Virginia,a lavish period drama based on the love affair between Sackville- West and Woolf at the beginning of the 1920s. While Vita’s dogged pursuit of Woolf is dramatically reimagined, the film is dripping with so many ...