Manchester theatre reviews
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Jointly produced with New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme
Reviewed by John Waterhouse and Charlie Britten April 2016
As with so many plays, ‘Kiss Me Quickstep’ has a tantalising title. It might suggest all manner of possibilities, yet in the end the play struggled to grasp them.
For a supposed comedy, the production had far too few laughs, and far too many scenes of laboured dialogue. Apart from a comment about the distinction between Lytham and Blackpool - one that played well with a Lancastrian audience - most of the good lines came in the second half of the play. It was only then, moreover, that a clear plot started to emerge, and real characters started to arise out of what had until then been a tepid meander with little apparent direction.
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Manchester theatre reviews
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by Paul Thompson and Phil Pearson
Four short stories about love, disaster, life and redemption from two Manchester playwrights staged in one evening in the city centre. Each play is fifteen minutes long, performed by up and coming talent from England and Ireland.
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Manchester theatre reviews
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A truly disappointing, muddled and uninspiring adaptation of a classic. Stylistically confusing and not totally accessible.
Who can ever forget the wonderful, sparkling, real and meaningful dialogue; the truthful and highly romantically charged chemistry between Hepburn and Peppard; the beautifully underscored tragi-comedy with music by Mancini; the brilliant directing of Blake Edwards? Well quite evidently Richard Greenberg can for one.
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Manchester music reviews
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Prior to the evening's main concert, one of the soloists, the tenor, Joshua Ellicott, accompanied by Paul Jones on the piano, performed a short pre-concert concert entitled, 'From Your Ever Loving Son, Jack'. It was a very beautiful and moving 40 minutes, in which Ellicott read the letters of his great nephew, Jack Ellicott, and told his story, that of a young soldier, from signing up in 1915 to his death on the Somme in 1916, through some well chosen and superbly sung English (and one French) songs.
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Manchester theatre reviews
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Presented by The Ricochet Project
The blurb for this event says ‘circus’ and ‘acrobatics’, and that’s what you get – a physical show with a backing track but not a word spoken by the pair who bend, balance, twist and dangle in ever more improbable ways. There is a hint of mime and some deft balletic moves but most of all they are a circus act, executing a series of entanglements and suspensions that seem genuinely risky.
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Manchester theatre reviews
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Presented by Breach Theatre
Six young people plan to re-enact the Battle of the Beanfield, when hundreds of new age travellers were ambushed by police near Stonehenge in 1985. The six are tenacious pranksters with an eye for the absurd. They thresh the corny clichés of hippy chic and mill the monstrous wrongs of police brutality as they plough the symbolic field of battle.
Their analysis shuttles back and forth in time and technique, being partly an attempt to re-enact the bust-up and partly a series of interviews with folk who were there. But mainly the tale is in the telling as it zeros in on passions unleashed in the ecstasy of battle.
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Manchester theatre reviews
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A Quarantine, HOME and Contact co-production, supported by SICK! Festival, at Old Granada Studios, Manchester
Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring. is an epic work performed in a large studio space by dozens of ordinary people including – crucially – the audience itself. The pace is relaxed, the setting comfortable and the mood convivial. Seven hours fly by.
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Manchester theatre reviews
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Something Wonderful, subtitled 'A Celebration of Rodgers And Hammerstein', this was a musical concert revue of some of the pair's more well known music at Manchester's newest and loveliest Fringe Theatre, Hope Mill Theatre in Ancoats.
The stage was decorated in purple curtains and chaise-longue with candles and fairy-lights, and the music played on an onstage piano by the Musical Director of the event George Francis. It was a very cosy and intimate setting but also gave an illusion of opulence and timelessness.
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Manchester theatre reviews
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The Islamist zombies had been at it again (in Brussels) and I was off - at the end of the same day - to see a play about suicide in Salford. More pressing tasks sprang to mind. Like the washing-up.
But I needn’t have worried. The play was less about nihilistic self-destruction than the havoc wreaked upon those left behind.
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Manchester film reviews
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What does the country Chile conjure up for you in the mind? I am not referring here to its political associations directly although for most of us we might summon up the names of Pinochet and Allende, and the CIA provoked coup of the 1970s. Can you define Chilean identity and the country’s national characteristics? If you can’t then you need to watch The Pearl Button and also if you get the chance, its predecessor, the even more remarkable Nostalgia de la Luz (Nostalgia of the Light, literally translated) part of a planned trilogy of which the Pearl Button is the middle film.
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