The New Wolsey has championed disabled performers by forming a production partnership with Graeae theatre company and then took the lead in helping to establish the Ramps on the Moon project. Both projects were incredibly successful at integrating disabled performers into mainstream productions.
With Graeae, the New Wolsey developed the Ian Drury musical Reasons To Be Cheerful, which was originally staged in 2010, was revived in 2012, and ended up being featured in the Special Olympics opening ceremony. The high point of Ramps on the Moon came with a critically acclaimed revival of the Pete Townsend musical Tommy which then went on a UK tour after its Ipswich run.
Published:
11:30 AM May 6, 2021
Sarah Holmes with the team at New Wolsey Theatre. The Ipswich theatre celebrates its 20th anniversary this year
- Credit: Mike Kwasniak
Spring is a time for renewal and rebirth. At the end of May, the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich will be opening its doors once again, hoping to put the deprivations of lockdown behind it, and looking forward to a future full of colour, innovation and entertainment.
Turn back the clock 20 years, and in 2001, the New Wolsey Theatre was doing the same thing. After two years of closure, following the collapse of the previous Wolsey Theatre company in 1999, the theatre was reborn as the New Wolsey and guided by two new, but experienced theatre-makers, the husband and wife team of Sarah Holmes and Peter Rowe, who had been enticed away from Theatr Clywd in north Wales, to run the Suffolk theatre.