Australian actor Daniel Koek arrives in Salford next week to star as Tony in the evergreen musical, West Side Story at the Lowry. He recently performed as part of the West End Chorus in Tim Rice’s own version of Chess in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Josh Groban, Idina Menzel and Kerry Ellis were but a few of the names that made this production particularly spectacular.

Dan also recently starred in the International tour of Saturday Night Fever, where he played Father Frank Junior and understudied DJ Monty. He is delighted to be a part of West Side Story and has described it as “a dream come true to be playing a lead role in such an iconic piece of theatre!”

We caught up with him this week, to find out five reasons why you should go and see him strut his stuff as Tony in Leonard Bernstein’s musical masterpiece. (more…)

Hi there. I’m Francesca Waite from Monkeywood Theatre.

With only 2 weeks to go until A Song For the Lovers opens at The Lowry (Thu 9 October), rehearsals are well under way with our new Monkey member, director Jo Fisher.

Jo runs her own children’s theatre school, Footlights, and is a very experienced theatre-maker as actor and director, so we are all getting the opportunity to bring something very new to this production.

Although we performed the play as part of the 24:7 Theatre Festival in 2006, the show has undergone radical redevelopment and the script is very different now to the original.

Over the Summer we spent time devising the plot and characters before writer, Sarah McDonald Hughes, got to work on the script and returned with a superb play that we are all really happy with. (more…)

Venue: Library Theatre
Date Reviewed: 24th September, 2008

The Glee Club opens in darkness as a group of male voices start to sing the old standard “Side by Side.” The song immediately evokes an earlier period and, as the lights come up, the sight of six men in the back room of a working-men’s club, in shirts and ties and with neatly side-parted hair, takes us back to the early 1960s and to a much simpler time.

It was, however, a decade on the cusp of upheaval and change. Richard Cameron’s heart warming play, takes place in a South Yorkshire mining town in the summer of 1962. (more…)

Venue: The Lowry
Date reviewed: 24th September, 2008

Katie Mitchell’s Waves is a real curate’s egg; as on one hand it is incredibly innovative and beautiful to watch, leaving you open-mouthed at its ingenuity.

But, on the other; this unique director tries to achieve so much in such a short space of time, that the mixture of sound effects, cinematic elements, actors doubling as stage hands and film crew, does make you long for moments of stillness, in order to feel the sadness and passion of Virginia Woolf’s earthy text.

You are still left, though with a production that mesmerises more often than it infuriates. Purists, beware as many will argue that providing the audience with close ups, the crunching of gravel, the sound of falling leaves, however evocative, stops the audience from using their imagination. (more…)

This competition is now closed and the winner is………….

Ann Hodges. Congratulations!

Following its debut at Chichester Festival, Calendar Girls has garnered some great reviews. We are offering you a pair of tickets for opening night at the Lowry.

THE PLAY:
North West audiences will have the chance to see the stage version of Calendar Girls in the flesh before London’s West End. They can anticipate the fun with a photo line-up of the cast recreating the famous cheeky image which helped to shoot the film version to international success.

The stage show heading for the North West will have an all-star cast including Lynda Bellingham, Patricia Hodge, Sian Phillips, Gaynor Faye, Brigit Forsyth, Julia Hills and Elaine C Smith.

Tim Firth’s moving play tells the tale of group of extraordinary women, members of a very ordinary Yorkshire WI, persuade one another to pose for a charity calendar with a difference! Puzzling their husbands, mortifying their children and riding the wrath of an outraged WI, they inadvertently spark a global phenomenon. As interest in the calendar snowballs, the ladies find themselves revealing more than they had ever planned.

(more…)