Some lively and dynamic performances from a committed cast, but sometimes less is more, and I wonder if fewer themes explored in more depth may have made the production more engaging.
West End in Blackpool – Winter Gardens | Review
April 12, 2021 Last updated:
April 12, 2021
Winter Gardens in Blackpool is certainly a versatile venue – BBC Television’s
Strictly Come Dancing, usually filmed at Elstree Studios, goes up to Blackpool for an episode each year (except, of course, when there’s a global pandemic going on), and it is the host venue of the Blackpool Dance Festival and the World Matchplay darts tournament. Previously home to various political party conferences, which now largely take place in even larger venues, the venue continues to move with the times: it is, at the time of writing, a Covid-19 vaccination centre.
Going Outside broadcast Live from TheMill.TV | Review
February 27, 2021 Last updated:
March 14, 2021
Jayce (Gerard Headley) is a music maker with, or so Chris (Kieran Mason) would have the audience believe, a platform. If Jayce were to ‘come out’ (inverted commas mine) it would, Chris thinks, be beneficial for others who have done the same. For Jayce, however, too much is at stake: rightly or wrongly, he believes his career would be wrecked if he were to be labelled as gay. More pertinently, as he puts it, “
not everyone needs to be assigned a letter from the alphabet”, a reference, perhaps, to the ever-burgeoning acronyms to describe non-straight people. (The show doesn’t go into further detail on this point, suffice to say one of the longer ones is LGBTQQIP2SAA, standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, intersex, pansexual, two-spirit (2S), androgynous and asexual.)
The National Theatre: Dick Whittington | Review
December 24, 2020 Last updated:
December 24, 2020
Put it this way – the National Theatre hasn’t done pantomime for a long time, and it shows. They did well to avoid celebrity casting, and while their efforts were honourable in their tribute to each and every other theatre in the country whose pantomimes have been postponed for a year (or even cancelled altogether for certain venues that have permanently closed their doors), it was like watching the England football team in the knock-out stages of the World Cup: they gave it their all, for sure, but it just didn’t turn out as well as it could have done.