Calendar Girls make another date
North West audiences will have another 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 for the second time features an all-star cast including Lynda Bellingham, Patricia Hodge, Sian Phillips, Gaynor Faye, Brigit Forsyth, Julia Hills and Elaine C Smith.
A 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.
Tim Firth has adapted the screenplay of his smash hit Miramax film for the stage. The film was released in 2003 and was an instant hit at the box office, becoming the number one grossing film in the UK on its release. Tim’s other credits include the films Blackball and Kinky Boots and the award winning Preston Front for the BBC. His theatre credits include the plays Neville’s Island, The Safari Party, The Flint Street Nativity and the Olivier Award winning musical, which arrives at the Lowry in September; Our House.
Calendar Girls is directed by Olivier Award winner Hamish McColl. Hamish is probably best known as half of the double act The right size, who from 1988 created a unique style of comic theatre culminating in the smash hit The Play What I Wrote which won the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment. Other credits include Hysterium in Edward Hall’s production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the National Theatre.
Calendar Girls returns to the Lowry from Mon 16 – Sat 21 March 2009.