Manchester theatre reviews
|
by Alan Ayckbourn
at Oldham Coliseum
Reviewed by John Waterhouse and Charlie Britten, April 2018
Â
Alan Ayckbourn is one of the most performed living playwrights in the world, with an astonishing repertoire of over seventy plays covering fifty plus years and he’s still writing! A lot of Ayckbourn plays are somewhat mediocre, like listening to a 1980’s album by Paul McCartney and wondering if this really was the same man who wrote so many Beatles classics. On that analogy, Relatively Speaking is Ayckbourn’s Sergeant Peppers; a clever, witty comedy which keeps a certain suspense running right up to the last line.
|
Read more...
|
|
Manchester theatre reviews
|
By Joe O’Byrne
at The Kings Arms, Salford
Reviewed by John Waterhouse, April 2018
Â
Tales from Paradise Heights is a collection of plays set in a rough, tough council estate, exploring the challenges and dangers for the people who live there. In Frank Morgan, it’s as bad as it gets as a villain, in the truest sense of the word he tells his own story. Frank is a hard, bad man of today but his sentiments are timeless; Al Capone went to prison saying ‘this is what I get for giving people a good time!’ and the Kray Twins thought the same thing, seeing themselves as benefactors.
Â
Frank Morgan is unrepentant and even proud of his litany of violence, fear and extortion but behind all his self-justifications, some interesting questions are raised.
|
Read more...
|
Manchester theatre reviews
|
at The Dancehouse Theatre
written by Brian Gorman, directed by Emma Bird
Â
New Dawn Fades is a play about four young men who decide to form a music group; it is a play about a city re-discovering an identity; it is a play about a descent into mental illness during ever growing success; it is a play about a very particular period of time.
|
Read more...
|
Manchester theatre reviews
|
at The Lowry
Adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen story by Poppy Burton-Morgan with music by Matt Devereaux
Â
Every once in a while, someone claims to have created a new genre, which is normally code for saying it is really a pastiche of something else. With The Little Mermaid, it looks like Metta Theatre Company have actually succeeded in doing just this by bringing together gymnastics, tricks, dance, actor/musicianship and singing to create what is truly a circus musical. The Little Mermaid is a joy to watch with seamless, non-stop action blending with a highly creative original music score and spirited singing and acting.
|
Read more...
|
Manchester theatre reviews
|
Reviewed by Jane Turner April 2018
Written by Rachel Wagstaff to mark the 100-year anniversary of the end of the first world war when at least 10 million people (many underage) lost their lives. The popular 400-page Sebastian Faulks novel that covers three different time periods, has been turned into a play of just over two hours. Even though some of the story has been omitted and it remains sympathetic to the spirit of the novel, I must confess that at times it felt almost as long as the war itself. The brutal reality of the trenches and tunnels and the needless horror of the bloody battlefields of France are well depicted and combined with scenes from an earlier peacetime and a love story at the heart of this tale.
It is an emotional and gripping production that begins in 1916, before the Battle of the Somme. The hopelessness, waste and insanity is captured onstage, and the audience are immersed in the horror and devastation of warfare and its inescapable misery and terror by a creative evocation of the sombre and explosive soundscape, graphic lighting displays and what must have been a flesh rotting and gas ridden stench. Several sudden loud explosions rocked the theatre and had the audience jumping out of their seats.
|
Read more...
|
Manchester theatre reviews
|
at Lowry
Reviewed by Jane Turner, April 2018
Â
Starring Jenny Eclair, Dilly Keane and Lizzie Roper
Between 2010 and 2050, the global population of over-65s is expected to treble from 530 million to 1.5 billion, and within the next 10 years, for the first time ever, over-65s will outnumber under-fives. The population is about to get a lot older, and if caricatures of old people are to be believed, and this play is full of them, the world is about to get a hell of a lot grumpier.
|
Read more...
|
Manchester theatre reviews
|
Art at The Lowry
By Yasmina Reza
Art has apparently grossed an astonishing £200M since its debut in 1996, propelling French playwright Yasmina Reza into the premier league of international playwrights and being translated into a host of languages.
There is a parallel to ‘Waiting for Godot’ (itself having been first performed in French) in that at first glance, all we see are two or three men talking and arguing and seemingly getting nowhere but as with Becket’s masterpiece, there is considerable depth to Art which leaves the audience pondering its meanings long after watching the show. This is also a play which breaks modern conventions with frequent soliloquies and occasional long speeches.
|
Read more...
|
Manchester theatre reviews
|
Reviewed by Jane Turner March 2018
Tony Blair is remembered for many things and blamed for everything from Iraq to the destruction of Old Labour. Educationalists remember him for his apparent focus on education embodied in his proclamation that Labour’s top priority ‘was, is and always will be education, education, education’, and this mantra is at the heart of this fast paced and entertaining comedy.
Feverishly performed by the Wardrobe Ensemble in the top-notch setting of the Lowry’s Quay Theatre, this is set in the anarchic Wordsworth comprehensive school on the day after the 1997 Labour landslide. The election result proclaimed that things would ‘only get better’, and the play asks questions about what we are taught and who is to blame for the current state of the education system. It is a reminder of how the Blair government, despite over a decade of major investment, failed to deliver on its promise of an education utopia.
|
Read more...
|
Manchester theatre reviews
|
Producer – Sir Cameron Mackintosh
Composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and lyricist Alain Boublil
Miss Saigon is my absolute favourite musical so writing this review is probably the hardest but the most exciting opportunity so far as a critic. I first saw the production at The Theatre Royal on Drury Lane in 1989, intrigued and enchanted by Cameron Mackintosh’s works I naively watched Miss Saigon with the cast of Lea Salonga as Kim, Simon Bowman as Chris and Jonathan Price as the Engineer not realising then that this musical would capture my heart for ever more.
|
Read more...
|
Manchester theatre reviews
|
at Opera House, Manchester
This is writer / director Kay Mellor's foray into Musical Theatre after her hit comedy TV series of the same name. The show opens with lycra and spandex clad overweight bodies bumping and gyrating at a Zumba class at the local church. The year is the present, not a flashback to the 80s, and so this is an instant fail, and sadly the show never recovers.
|
Read more...
|
|
|
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next > End >>
|
Page 2 of 30 |