The West Yorkshire Playhouse as was is now in the hands of workmen, while the newborn Leeds Playhouse is set to kick off a new season at the temporary Pop Up Theatre while the renovation is underway. The pop up is a stone’s throw from the Playhouse’s usual entrance and it will house almost all... Continue Reading →
Searching for the Heart of Leeds: A Fond & Vibrant Farewell… & Hello
Friday 22nd June 2018 at Leeds Playhouse (formerly West Yorkshire Playhouse). ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Searching for the Heart of Leeds is the final show produced by West Yorkshire Playhouse prior to its major re-development. It marks a crossover from West Yorkshire Playhouse to the Leeds Playhouse rebrand and the production mirrors that sense of departure and arrival;... Continue Reading →
Talking Heads – Susan, Doris & Irene: Superb
Wednesday 20th June 2018 at West Yorkshire Playhouse. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Alan Bennett really is a genius. Every so often, I forget this fact but a perfectly staged production like this becomes an impressive reminder. West Yorkshire Playhouse is producing the first 6 dramatic monologues of Bennet’s Talking Heads which landed in living rooms in 1988 and... Continue Reading →
Opera North’s Berlin to Broadway: Both Entertaining & Illuminating
Tuesday 19th June 2018 at Leeds City Varieties Music Hall. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Beginning with ‘Mack the Knife’ by torchlight, Opera North’s Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill makes a beautifully nostalgic and atmospheric arrival to the stage. From this glimpse of 1920s ambience created by Tim Skelly’s lighting design, notably reminiscent of underground caverns and the... Continue Reading →
Hard Times: Dickens’ Masterful Caricatures Shine Brightly
Tuesday 22nd May 2018 at West Yorkshire Playhouse. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Northern Broadsides tackle a literary giant with their latest production, Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Deborah McAndrew certainly set herself a mammoth task in adapting the work of one of the most charmingly verbose figures of the British Literary Canon into two and a half hours of... Continue Reading →
The Girl on the Train: A Best-Seller Hits the Stage
Wednesday 16th May 2018 at West Yorkshire Playhouse. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ A brand new book-to-movie hit lands on stage with West Yorkshire Playhouse’s production of Paula Hawkins’ hugely successful novel The Girl on the Train. Adapted for the stage by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel and directed by Joe Murphy, it’s a thriller which sees a confused... Continue Reading →
Dollywould: Unfettered Random Fandom
Friday 11th May 2018 at the Live Arts Bistro, Leeds. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Sh!t Theatre duo Becca and Louise love Dolly Parton. They’re fascinated by Dolly the cloned sheep and ideas of mortality and immortality. They’re satirical when it comes to the mind-numbing grasp consumerism has on the average citizen, bemused by the close proximity of preservation... Continue Reading →
The Game of Love and Chai: Neglects Key Ingredients
Friday 4th May 2018 at West Yorkshire Playhouse. ⭐️⭐️ In The Game of Love and Chai, Nigel Planer takes the framework of Marivaux’s Eighteenth Century farce and updates it, retaining the mistaken identity plot but modernising characters and reference points. This farce finds merit in bringing another much needed BAME story to our stages, with... Continue Reading →
Sunshine on Leith: A Hit with Both Substance and Style
Friday 27th April 2018 at West Yorkshire Playhouse. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Sunshine on Leith is the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s latest musical venture and if the unanimous standing ovations and deafening cheers at the curtain call are anything to go by, it’s a hit for amorous audiences. As a show constructed around hits of The Proclaimers like I’m... Continue Reading →
Our Country’s Good: An Accessibility Game Changer
Wednesday 11th April 2018 at West Yorkshire Playhouse. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good is based on The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally which is a classic approach to the play-within-a-play trend. It’s the unusual and fascinating subject matter which gives this play its pull; taking audiences back in time to settings untraveled by law abiding... Continue Reading →