Tag Archives: Review

Music: Asher Goldschmitt Director: Sara Colangelo Reviewer: Rich Jevons Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lisa Spinelli who has a day job as a kindergarten teacher. She lives out a fairly banal existence but has aspirations to be a successful poet. Her attempts at poetry for her evening class in creative writing are fairly uninspired. That is until she starts to plagiarise the ...

Musicians: David Greed (violin), Ian Buckle (piano) Reviewer: Ron Simpson The Dewsbury Lunchtime Concert Season is part of Kirklees Council and Opera North’s initiative to bring regular musical events to the area. Faced with continuing financial stringency, both the Huddersfield Concert Season and the Dewsbury lunchtime concerts rely ever more heavily on the host company, but this brings no reduction ...

Reviewer: Jane Austwick Wieke Eringa, Artistic Director of Yorkshire Dance, sums up the aims and intentions of the Encounters Festival: Yorkshire Dance is building a community of activists – from all walks of life – around performances addressing some of the big questions of our age. Encounters has brought together inspiring dance artists with a diverse crowd to share food, ...

Writer & Composer: Jason Robert Brown Director: Angharad Lee Reviewer: Beth Steer In the latest in a series of ‘Performances for the Curious’ from the Wales Millennium Centre, Leeway Productions puts on a version of Jason Robert Brown’s musical, The Last Five Years – with a spin. Following 20-something New Yorkers Jamie (Michael Hamway), an aspiring author, and Cathy (Lauren Hood), a ...

Writer: Miriam Sherwood Reviewer:  Richard Maguire Miriam Sherwood’s grandparents threw the biggest parties in the darkest times. Surviving the Nazis in the Second World War, and then surviving the political purges of the 1970s, Sherwood’s grandparents managed to remain in Slovakia for decades before they were forced to flee to Munich. Rendezvous in Bratislava is Sherwood’s attempt to recreate one of ...

Musicians: Andrew Long (violin), Robert Ashworth (horn), Ian Buckle (piano) Reviewer: Ron Simpson The Cathedral Concert Society is clearly a lively and successful institution. Monthly concerts during the Winter draw more than sizeable audiences to the magnificent setting of the spacious Quire (the cathedral favours the old spelling) of Ripon Cathedral – and the acoustic’s excellent, too. The November guests ...

Reviewer: Julia Beasley Those talented folk from the Wardrobe Theatre of Bristol are at it again – putting together disparate cultural ingredients to serve up a feel-good fusion of happy-clappy, sexually explicit musical entertainment. For this production staged at the Tobacco Factory Theatre, the original cult classic films are Rocky and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. One is a macho ...

Writer: Nick Makoha Music: Duramaney Kamara Director: Roy Alexander Weise Choreographer: Jennifer  Jackson Reviewer: Julia Beasley It is 1978 in Idi Amin’s  Uganda. Four-year-old Nick and his mother are fleeing from a strife-torn homeland that has been ravaged by years of military dictatorship.  The story of their journey from Kampala to Heathrow is recalled by the now adult Nick, in ...