Leicester Haymarket to Go Round The Rink

The prestigious Leicester Haymarket Theatre in the Midlands city of Leicester is to stage a new production of Kander and Ebb’s 1984 Broadway flop, The Rink. The production opens today, 4 September 1998, and runs to 26 September.

Originally written as a vehicle for Liza Minnelli (who had made her Tony-winning Broadway debut in Kander and Ebb’s Flora the Red Menace, and subsequently won an Oscar for her Sally Bowles in the film version of Cabaret) and Chita Rivera (who starred in the original Broadway production of Chicago), the show had them playing a daughter and mother respectively, trying to rebuild their relationship against the background of a past that is being destroyed. The book is by Terrence McNally (who subsequently wrote the books to the musicals Kiss of the Spiderwoman and Ragtime).

In Leicester, the leading roles will be played by Linzi Hateley (whose professional debut was in the title role of the ill-fated RSC Stratford-upon-Avon production of the musical Carrie that subsequently played briefly on Broadway, but who has since gone on to roles in bigger successes like Les Miserables and Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) and Kathryn Evans, last seen in London in Dempsey and Rowe’s The Fix at the Donmar Warehouse. Last year, Evans starred in two musicals at Leicester, playing Maria in The Sound of Music and the Witch in Into the Woods.

The production is directed by the Haymarket’s artistic director, Paul Kerryson, who in 1987 also staged the British premiere of The Rink at Manchester’s Wythenshawe Theatre in a production that subsequently transferred to the West End’s Cambridge Theatre, with Diane Langton and Josephine Blake. Earlier this summer, a separate new production of the show was staged on the London fringe at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre.

Mark Shenton