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Grease lightning strikes as NETheatre York’s cast of 60 revs up for JoRo run

NETheatre York’s production triumvirate for Grease The Musical: Creative director/producer Steve Tearle, centre, with choreographer Ellie Roberts and musical director Scott Phillips

AFTER another name change, NETheatre York begins a new term at Rydell High with a cast of 60 pupils enrolled for Grease The Musical from tomorrow to Saturday.

Formerly NE and before that NE Musicals York and several variations on a New Earswick theme, the company with the “New and Exciting” tag is spanning its scope.

“The reason why we wanted to change the name is because we want our company to be as diverse as possible and to cover as many things as possible, not just musicals, but plays and dance too,” says Steve. A case of NE theatre symbolising any form of theatre.

“Like taking part in the York Community Choir Festival at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre next year and performing at the York Proms in June, when we had our part in both sections on the main stage – and that’s the first time Rebecca [organiser Rebecca Fewtrell] has done that – as well as being on the community stage in the interval. We did selections from Oliver! in the first half and Les Miserables in the second.”

Calum Davis’s Kenickie

Amid the NamE changes, the company has shown consistency in its choice of production team for this week’s show at the JoRo. Once more, Steve Tearle is the creative director/producer – and cannot resist playing Teen Angel to boot – alongside musical director Scott Phillips and choreographer Ellie Roberts as audiences are transported back to all-American 1959 and the senior year at Rydell High.

After a whirlwind summer romance, Danny Zuko and Sandy Dumbrowski thought they would never see each other again but find themselves at the same high school as the T Birds and the Pink Ladies assemble for the new term.

Playing Danny and Sandy will be University of Hull student Finley Butler and Cleethorpes pantomime star Maia Beatrice (her stage name, shedding her surname of Stroud). “We know each other from doing the diploma in acting at York College six years ago, so we have a few shows together under our belt, like The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui Rise, and then last year I did The Wind In The Willows with this company, who I got to join because of Maia,” says Finley.

Maia, 22, from York, will be returning to TaleGate Theatre’s pantomime ranks this winter for Cinderella at the Parkway Cinema, Cleethorpes, playing Prince Charming after her title role in Pinocchio there last winter. “I get all the principal boy parts,” she says of pantomime’s traditional thigh-slapping role. Her thighs? “Very slappable!” she laughs.

Maia Beatrice’s Sandy Bumbrowski and Finley Butler’s Danny Zuko in NETheatre York’s Grease The Musical

For Grease, she was drawn to playing either Sandy or bad girl Rizzo. “I’m used to playing grittier characters that I can get my teeth into,” she says. “But I do feel I’m more of a Sandy with my blonde hair and blue eyes – and Sandy is the dream role.”

Steve chips in: “We’ve not made Sandy as sweet and innocent as she’s usually played.” Such as? “I take Rizzo down…to the floor,” says Maia.

Steve elaborates: “The musical is meatier than the film version, which they cleaned up a little. The original story was much grittier when it was first launched in Chicago, written for a bunch of teenagers. I haven’t gone back to that version, but we’ve kept the grittiness, and as part of that emphasis, the story of Rizzo and Kenickie runs side by side with Danny and Sandy’s.”

Finley, 22, has just graduated from the University of Hull with a degree in drama and theatre practice and will return there this autumn to study for a Masters in theatre making. “The course I’ve done is not just about the acting and drama side but there’s very much a focus on practice, so you can specialise in many different things, and towards the end my focus was on directing and lighting design,” he says.

Melissa Boyd and Calum Davis as Rizzo and Kenickie

“Throughout my time there, I directed shows, like doing a children’s theatre pieced called The Forest, where we had to use sign language and stage it in the round. On top of that, I’m now the president of the university’s performing arts society, a post which runs on into the next year as I do my Masters.”

Finley, by the way, will be Steve’s assistant director for NETheatre York’s upcoming production of Fiddler On The Roof when Steve will combine directing duties with playing the lead, the poor Jewish milkman Tevye.

This summer, Finley’s focus is on Danny Zuko and not least on the way he moves. “A lot of it I have taken from John Travolta, those Travolta-isms. Danny is very bold in his movement,” he says.

“But I also wanted to focus on the conflict within Danny, who has this core persona of not liking a particular girl above any other, but then Sandy comes along, and she’s like a thorn, getting under his skin. You find subtle ways to show that inner conflict through his movement as he’s so expressive.”

Juliette Brenot as Frenchy

As for achieving the Danny Zuko look: “I’ve just received the all-important comb!” says Finley. “The styling takes a lot of gel and a lot of hairspray. I must have got through nearly a whole can for the photo-shoot.”

In the cast too will be Ali Butler Hind. “I’m playing the ballet teacher, part of the staff that oversee the pupils and do the scene changes in this production, which is a clever idea,” she says. “We’re there to support the head teacher, Miss Lynch, and I think our presence in this production really helps, especially in the dance contest scene.”

NETheatre York has paid the extra musical rights to be able to use Grease, You’re The One That I Want, Sandy and Hopelessly Devoted To You from the 1978 film. “They’re not normally in the musical but we really wanted to have them,” says Steve. Out go Drive In Movie, All Choked Up and It’s Raining On Prom Night.

“With songs like Hopelessly Devoted To You and There Are Worse Things (I Could Do), the text is incredible and says so much,” says musical director Scott Phillips. “They’re a good example of the how the songs pull the plot along and really show the character too, and that’s why Grease has stuck around down the years.”

Sam Richardson as Eugene

From the keyboards, Scott will be leading a band featuring two tenor saxophones, two electric guitars, one bass guitar and drums. “The show verges on modern jazz in terms of its arrangements,” he says.

Scott has arranged a Grease Mega-Mix for a party mood to close the show. “We’re delighted to have been given permission to use it,” says Steve. “People will leave the theatre with that vibe.

“It’s all part of making it an experience to go to this show, whether it’s the glitter station at the theatre, the authentic Fifties’ costumes, or the mega-mix finale. You’ll know you’re at Rydell High from the moment you arrive, and we’ll be breaking down theatre’s fourth wall straightaway.

“We’ve even got a big neon Grease sign on stage in the shape of a car, made and delivered from China in only two weeks.””

NETheatre York in Grease The Musical, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, July 25 to 29, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Tickets update: first night, sold out; last few tickets for all other shows. Box office: 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk

Mat Clarke as Doody

Who will be playing the principal roles in NETheatre York’s Grease The Musical?

Finley Butler as Danny Zuko; Maia Beatrice as Sandy Dumbrowski; Melisaa Boyd, Rizzo; Calum Davis, Kenickie; Flyn Coultous, Roger; Mo Kinnes, Jan; Mat Clarke, Doody; Juliette Brenot, Frenchy; Kristian Barley, Sonny, Erin Greeley, Marty, Sam Richardson, Eugene, and Chloe Drake, Patty.

Did you know?

LOOK out for Maia Beatrice at York Maze, Elvington, this summer, hosting a trailer ride, playing characters and being a mascot. If you spot Corn on the Cob or the back end of a cow, between now and September 4, that will be Maia.

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More Things To Do in York and beyond. Advice? Ignore the rain. Consult Hutch’s List No. 30 for 2023, from The Press, York

Finley Butler’s Danny Zuko and Maia Beatrice’s Sandy Dumbrowski in NETheatre York’s Grease at the JoRo Theatre

GREASE is not the only word as Charles Hutchinson picks highlights aplenty for the weeks ahead, from comedy to puppetry, workshops to festivals, burlesque to blues.

Musical of the week: NETheatre York in Grease, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, Tuesday to Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee

STEVE Tearle directs University of Hull theatre student Finn Butler and Cleethorpes pantomime star Maia Beatrice in the lead roles in this celebration of the 1950s in its duck-tailed, bobby-soxed, gum-snapping glory.

The American high school dream is about to explode in this coming-of-age musical with its story of hot-rodding T-Bird Danny Zuko and the sweet new girl in town, Sandy Dumbrowski, whose secret summer romance resurfaces as they unexpectedly discover they are now at the same school. Tickets update: limited availability, so prompt booking is advised on 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.

Russell Howard: Two problem-solving shows in a day at Grand Opera House, York

Comedy gig(s) of the week: Russell Howard, Grand Opera House, York, today, 3pm and 7.30pm

COMEDIAN Russell Howard plays two shows in a day in York on his 2023 tour, the afternoon gig having sold out already. As we reel from one global crisis to the next, the host of Russell Howard’s Good News and The Russell Howard Hour will be putting the world to rights. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.  

The poster for this week’s Connect Festival, hosted by Four Wheel Drive

Children’s activity of the weekend: Play In A Day with Four Wheel Drive, Connect Festival, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, tomorrow, 10am

AIMED at ten to 14-year-olds, this action-packed, fast-paced, fun session will create a play based on a classic text in only four hours, guided ​​by Connect Festival organisers Four Wheel Drive’s Educate creative team.Participants will showcase their work in the black-box theatre in front of an audience of family and friends at 4pm. Tickets: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

The Outside In plant studio owner Alice Maynard, who will lead tomorrow’s workshop at the Connect Festival

Workshop of the week: Build A Mini Terrarium With The Outside In, Connect Festival, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, tomorrow, 12.30pm

YORK plant studio The Outside In hosts a step-by-step guide to creating a sustainable miniature garden world, using tropical plants, mosses and decorative stones to bring the landscape to life.

The key words to describe Alice Maynard’s Sunday session are sustainability, mindfulness, creativity, relaxation and insightfulness as adults and children aged seven and over learn the history of terrariums. Each participant will be provided with a mystery mini-figure to help tell a story. Tickets: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

Lempen Puppet Theatre Company in Flotsam & Jetsam, on tour in Pocklington

Family show of the week: Lempen Puppet Theatre Company in Flotsam & Jetsam, Pocklington Arts Centre, Thursday, 2.30pm

FLOTSAM is soft, flexible, laid back. She slides and glides through life on the ice. Jetsam is the opposite, his insectile body is stiff and nervy, alert and watchful, suspicious of all in his forest home. Both are cast adrift in a world that is strange to them and full of danger.

Finally washed up on the same island beach, these two very different creatures must discover the other and work together in a hope-filled adventure story, told with original music and puppetry, for four-year-olds upwards. Box office: 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.

Public Service Broadcasting: Saturday headliners at next week’s Deer Shed Festival

Festival of the week: Deer Shed Festival, Baldersby Park, Topcliffe, July 28 to 31

THE Comet Is Coming, Public Service Broadcasting and The Delgados take the music headline slots at Deer Shed 2023. Keep an eye out for Gaz Coombes, The Big Moon, This Is The Kit, Dream Wife, Gwenno, James Yorkston & Nina Persson, Rozi Plain, Elanor Moss and a DJ set by snooker legend Steve Davis & Kavus Torabi.

A science tent with AI album covers, comedy, sports, spoken word and literary events, workshops, theatre, cinema and well being all play their part in the four days too. For ticket availability, head to: deershedfestival.com.

Lily Monarch rules in the poster artwork for A Little Bit Of Everything at The Crescent

Could we interest you in…A Little Bit Of Everything? On show at The Crescent, York, next Saturday, 7.45pm to 11pm

IN a night of drag, cabaret, burlesque and comedy, Lily Monarch is joined by The Family Shambles and the crown jewels of York’s drag scene. Look out for Bodie Snatcher, Bailey Bubbles, Lois Carmen, Denominator, Wilhelmina Rose, Robynne Ryske, Luna Hex, Dick Fran Dyke, MX Fish Fingers, Tommy Boi, Reese Wetherspoon and York’s drag king boy band Boyz 2 Kings. Box office: thecrescentyork.com.

The poster for Cafe Mambo Ibiza Classics In The City at York Barbican

House moves: Cafe Mambo Ibiza Classics In The City: A Night Of Timeless House Music, York Barbican, August 5, 8pm

AFTER two sell-out shows, iconic house music brand Cafe Mambo Ibiza completes a hattrick of York Barbican nights with Classics In The City, showcasing influential floor fillers from three decades, from CeCe Peniston’s Finally to Derrick May’s Strings Of Life.

On the decks will be Paul Oakenfold, Judge Jules, Danny Rampling and Erik Hagleton, complemented by live performances from Julie McKnight and Shingai. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.

Star Stone: Starring in #MeToo, her one-woman comedy show, at Theatre@41, Monkgate

Fringe politics: Star Stone in #MeToo, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, August 3, 7.30pm

AMERICAN writer, actress, producer and playwright Star Stone presents her one-woman educational comedy #MeToo in York ahead of her Edinburgh Fringe debut next month.

“Sex cults with fake feminism, Pretend Shamans, Burning Man and Lower East Side nightclub ‘photographers’” all make an appearance in a hour-long show with 20-plus characters. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

On the road to the patio: Jess Gardham heads for York Theatre Royal

Moody blues: Jess Gardham, York Theatre Royal patio, August 4, 6pm

YORK singer, songwriter and musical theatre actress Jess Gardham plays outdoors in an evening performance on the revamped Theatre Royal patio.

Jess has played on BBC Introducing, supported Paul Carrack, KT Tunstall, The Shires and Martin Simpson and starred in principal roles in Hairspray The Musical, Ghost The Musical and Rock Of Ages. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

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REVIEW: The 39 Steps, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until July 29 ****

Niall Ransome, left, Olivia Onyehara, Dave Hearn and Lucy Keirl in the Stephen Joseph Theatre’s even better 2023 revival of The 39 Steps. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

THE 39 Steps has enjoyed a happy association with Yorkshire, first in North Country Theatre founder Nobby Dimon and Simon Corble’s initial stage concept of taut thriller and comic release.

Next came Patrick Barlow’s frantically fast-moving yet unflappable West Yorkshire Playhouse adventure with seeds sown in the earlier show.

Barlow’s spiffing version has since played here, there and everywhere, first given Stephen Joseph Theatre comedic top spin by artistic director Paul Robinson in June 2018.

Five summers on, Robinson revisits that slick, playful jaffa of a show, with the promise of 39 new gags, one for each step, to supplement the elegance, eloquence and elasticity of this dapper and dastardly clever whodunit.

Niall Ransome is back from 2018, in the same role (make that multiple roles) but now called Clown 1, rather than Man. Significantly, he teams up with fellow Mischief maker Dave Hearn, duly mining the hugely popular Mischief brand for dextrous feats of physical comedy rooted in a battle of wits and will against chaos and catastrophe.

York audiences have experienced Hearn’s manic craft already this year in Original Theatre’s three-hander account of HG Wells’s The Time Machine, another comedy vehicle steered by a short-handed cast in a race against time.

On that occasion, in a play within a play conceit, his assertive, egotistical Dave Wells was in such a hurry, he wore tracksuit trousers and trainers.

This time, in a play with a novel and a film within it, Hearn is playing more of an old-fashioned, cigarette-card matinee idol, Richard Hannay, side-parting in his immaculate haircut, side splitting in his comic clambering on the Forth Bridge, reminiscent of a Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton. Suspense in suspension.

This is but one of a series of scenes that re-creates setpieces from The Master’s movies, complemented by pastiches and references to other Hitchcock classics, with new additions among those 39 new jokes.

The novel is John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps; the film is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 British spy thriller, based loosely on Buchan’s serialised 1915 work. Barlow and in turn Robinson marry the two together, gravely serious in replicating the tone and dramatic peaks of both against all logical odds, while finding comedy at every opportunity without turning everything into a stiff upped-lipped send-up.

This is Hearn’s skill too, serving Hannay’s dispirited mien first and foremost before the John Cleese school of alarm-bell comedy bursts through. Dashing and upright, yes, with pipe and pencil-slim moustache, but newly returned to his lonely Portland Place abode, he is tired of life and its mounting pile of problems. Felling anything but alive in 1935. Suicidal even. 

What he needs is…a night at the theatre (don’t we all, especially one like this!), only for a much bigger problem to ensue once there. Not only must he navigate his way through hairpin bends of Buchan’s book and Hitchcock’s film, but now too he finds himself  murder suspect number one when a mysterious German woman, Annabelle Schmidt (Olivia Onyehara), dies in his arms after insisting on leaving the London Palladium by his side, desperate to impart vital information.

In a moment typical of the comic invention in Hearn’s performance, he extricates himself from beneath the dead weight of the woman’s body by using the knife in her back as a lever.

Hannay must hot-foot it to Scotland by train. On his fluttering jacket tail are policemen, secret agents and assorted women, all delivered with elan by Ransome and Lucy Keirl’s Clown combo, parading accents and exaggerated characters stride by stride, sometimes side by side.

What cracking casting in Ransome making his return in tandem with Keirl, who is as delightful as she was in Nick Lane’s Cinderella at the SJT last winter.  

Onyehara, a familiar name to Yorkshire credits lists from her work with Pilot Theatre, Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre, Hull Truck and York Theatre Royal, is terrific too. Not only as anguished Annabelle, but also as femme fatale Pamela and shy but far from retiring Scottish farmer’s wife Margaret, each drawn to the cut of Hannay’s jib.

Ever straight as Geoffrey Boycott’s bat at North Marine Road, Hearn’s narrator Hannay takes on whatever is thrown at him, defying the need to lead the story-telling with such limited resources, improvising emergency props and scenery, chalking up those extra gags amid the comic carnage.

Robinson’s 2023 company applies even quicker sleight of hand to Barlow’s spinning plates of verbal wit, theatrical anarchy, satirical savvy and visual panache, somehow pulling off their Hitchcock homage without a hitch.

Simon Slater’s sound design, compositions and nods to swing tunes play their part too, as do Helen Coyston’s fabulous, fun costumes and set design, stretched by Robinson’s direction beyond the SJT stage to the aisles and director’s box too.

Look out for the ushers blocking the exits at one particularly urgent moment. Even the theatre is against Hannay! Make sure you too are trapped in his breathless, befuddled world before this month is out. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.

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York College’s first acting degree intake heads for a knockout climax at York Theatre Royal Studio tonight and tomorrow

Jorgie Willingham’s Referee and Jim Carnall’s boxer Paul Stokes in rehearsal for The Sweet Science Of Bruising at York Theatre Royal. Picture: James Harvey

FOR the knock-out show of the week in York, look no further than Joy Wilkinson’s The Sweet Science Of Bruising, staged at York Theatre Royal Studio tonight and tomorrow by the York College and University Centre’s first cohort of Acting for Stage and Screen BA students.

This epic tale of passion, politics and pugilism in the world of 19th-century women’s boxing forms their graduating production after two intense years at the Slim Balk Lane campus in Bishopthorpe

Set up in partnership with York Theatre Royal and Screen Yorkshire in 2021, the course is designed for a maximum intake each year of 16, 12 signing up in the first year and 11 in the second.

“Entry is based on rigorous auditions, with many more applications than places available,” says programme leader and acting lecturer James Harvey. “The youngest starter would be 18; the oldest, 37. There’s no age limit. It’s all about giving an opportunity.

“Lots of the students in the first year were the first from their family to go to university, so the aim is to offer high quality but not at a prohibitive expense.

“Setting up the course was wrapped in the idea that there needs to be a place in our region that has great accessibility and is affordable, doing a course over two years, when the vast majority of training takes place in London and courses around the country are out of people’s price range. Since Bretton Hall closed, there was nowhere to go around here, and we’ve changed that.”

Gaining the partnerships with York Theatre Royal and Screen Yorkshire gave the degree course momentum, and crucially too, it is endorsed by the Open University and is one of around 20 education providers in Great Britain and Ireland affiliated to the Spotlight Graduate Membership Scheme. The only other one in Yorkshire is based in Leeds.

The students have been undertaking two years of professional acting training under Harvey, who has been assisted by a team of experienced industry professionals, such as voice lecturer Yvonne Morley-Chisholm, who works regularly at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London; movement lecturers Jen Malarkey and Gemma O’Connor; professional development lecturers Niall Costigan and Cassie Vallance, both familiar figures from the York stage, and screen acting lecturer Kate Chappell.

External industry experts are invited frequently to share their knowledge with the students, while the Royal Shakespeare Company has delivered a workshop on motion capture.

“The students have done incredibly well, doing an accelerated two-year course rather than the usual three, so they only get the college breaks: two weeks at Christmas, two at Easter, then working through the summer, with two weeks off in September,” says James.

“The first-year students spend five weeks on a placement, whether at York Theatre Royal, Pilot Theatre in York, Talking Lens Pictures in Leeds, or Blackpool Grand Theatre, for example. Even Harvest Films in Sweden.

“That’s a big focus for us, the industry side of it, to go with Spotlight-recognised daily training, all day, every day, which gives credibility to what we’ve done for professional industry training.”

James has been impressed by the commitment of the first intake. “Some had done a foundation course at drama school but they wanted to come and do intensive training here, really buying into two years of living as actor-training monks,” he says.

As well as doing productions at York College and York Theatre Royal, students have worked with Screen Yorkshire at York Castle Museum last year and York Mansion House this year.

In May, York College University Centre staged its debut Graduate Showcase at the Theatre Royal, where the first graduating cohort exhibited their drama skills in a series of extracts from Patrick Marber’s Closer, Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, Matt Hartley’s Sixty Five Miles, Penelope Skinner’s Eigengrau, Evan Placey’s Consensual and Katherine Chandler’s Bird, played out in front of industry professionals on the lookout for talent.

A video of the performances is being sent out to agents unable to make the showcase. “It was a culmination of two years of professional actor training and gave our first cohort of actors an opportunity to present their work to the industry, which will launch them into successful careers for many years,” says James.

Now comes their final show, The Sweet Science Of Bruising, set in London, 1869, where four very different Victorian women are drawn into the dark underground of female boxing by the eccentric Professor Sharp. Controlled by men and constrained by corsets, each finds an unexpected freedom in the boxing ring as they fight inequality as well as each other.

“The students will still be with us throughout August, working on Creating My Own Work, which is like the practical equivalent of a dissertation, with full responsibility for everything they do in their ten-minute pieces,” concludes James.

York College BA (Hons) Acting for Stage and Screen Graduating Students in The Sweet Science Of Bruising, York Theatre Royal Studio, tonight and Friday, 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

Did you know?

JAMES Harvey is developing a musical with West End collaborators.

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REVIEW: York Theatre Royal in Sovereign, King’s Manor, Exhibition Square, York, until July 30 ****

Sleuth and sidekick: Fergus Rattigan’s Matthew Shardlake with Sam Thorpe-Spinks’s Jack Barak in Mike Kenny’s adaptation of C J Sansom’s Sovereign in the King’s Manor courtyard. Picture: Charlotte Graham

FIRST the bad news. Not the July weather forecast, but the Sold Out notices denoting you are too late to book for the rest of the fortnight run of this summer’s York Theatre Royal community play.

Such has been the demand to see Mike Kenny’s adaptation of C J Sansom’s Tudor-set thriller in the very place where the biggest chunk of this best-selling sleuth story is set: King’s Manor, so re-named from the Abbot’s House to mark Henry VIII’s visit to the city with his latest queen du jour, Catherine Howard.

Staged in partnership with the University of York on its city campus, Sovereign plays out in the courtyard, the one with the tree at its epicentre and steps that add both height and dramatic statement to co-directors Juliet Forster, John R Wilkinson and Mingyu Lin’s grand production.

Aside from the front row, each capacity house of 240 is protected by a canopy from the rain, leaving the cast of 100 to battle with the elements, as they did last night and rather more so amid Saturday’s heavy downpours.

Kenny, a veteran of York outdoor productions from 2012’s The York Mysteries in the Museum Gardens and Blood + Chocolate on the city streets, even has Sovereign’s Greek chorus – or Women of York Chorus, to be precise – defy the rain with a knowing Yorkshire shrug. They will comment on a woman’s lot in Henry’s world with feminist ire too, resonating with the #MeToo era.

In our age of “levelling up”, but not levelling truthfully with the people, Kenny makes much of the north-south divide in Sovereign, right from the opening scene where Mark Gowland’s gouty, vainglorious Henry makes claim to godlike status, to the chagrin of Rosy Rowley’s no-nonsense God on a York Mystery Plays wagon on the other side of the stage.

As the play unfolds, towards its close after two hours and 45 minutes, Kenny makes a series of bullet pronouncements on the division between Protestant South and Papist North. Not only did Henry take land from Yorkshire landowners and dissolve the monasteries of God’s Own Country, but he put a stop to the Mysteries, seeing them as Catholic propaganda. History will tell you the wagons rolled on for a while longer, but then fell silent until the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Henry is a hated figure in York in Sansom’s story, as he seeks to impose the Royal Progress of 1541. The “Southerans” are unwelcome, not only “Fat Harry”, but also disabled lawyer Matthew Shardlake (Fergus Rattigan) and his Jack-the-lad Jewish sidekick, Jack Barak (University of York history and politics alumnus Sam Thorpe-Spinks).

Shardlake is mocked as a bottled spider by Henry, a crouchback by others; Joe Hooper’s Fulke Radwinter takes against Barak and Shardlake, taunting Barak about the events of March 16 1190, the Massacre of the Jews at Clifford’s Tower.

At Clifford’s Tower in Sovereign the body of Robert Aske, convicted of high treason by Henry, is still hanging five years after his execution in 1537. Plenty more bodies will pile up by the play’s end, more in the tradition of Jacobean tragedies.

Thorpe-Spinks has called Barak “Dr Watson to Shardlake’s Holmes”, but he rather more reminds you of Dennis Waterman’s Terry McCann in Minder with his feisty willingness to challenge all comers and eye for the ladies. Or one lady in particular, Livy Potter’s resourceful Tamasin Reedbourne, as Potter continues her run of winning performances in recent months.

Rattigan makes for a wily and worldly Shardlake, but lawyers have a bad name in this world – another dig delivered with comic timing in Kenny’s canny script – and so he becomes a more complex character as Sansom’s stinging story progresses. Not a conventional hero, not morally straight-backed, but remorseless as a Poirot. By comparison, Thorpe-Spinks’ lovable Barak is a little under-used, but then he is preoccupied with Potter’s Tamasin.

Shardlake and Barak have been sent north to keep an eye on political prisoner Edward Broderick (Nick Naidu-Bock, haunted and haunting), but the murder of a York glazier finds the plot thickening like a bechamel sauce.

So much is bubbling away in Sansom’s story: Matthew Page’s Giles Wrenne earnestly seeking to challenge Henry’s right to the throne; the Conspiracy at work; Scarlett Rowley’s insouciant Queen Catherine playing away from home with Josh Davies’s former beau Thomas Culpeper (or Culpepper in this version); Maurice Crichton’s curmudgeonly Yorkshireman Maleverer in peak scene-stealing form.

Not only does this community play have a chorus but an even larger York Ensemble for crowd scenes and dance numbers steered by movement director Hayley Del Harrison, and a King’s Ensemble for more north-south shenanigans.

The directing triumvirate achieves a balance between scenes on a physical grand scale and ones of more intimacy of a psychological nature. As for spectacle, look out for dramatic entrances by horses and a bear, courtesy of Animated Objects’ animal heads, and a cock-fighting scene too.

Dawn Allsopp’s set design works in happy union with King’s Manor, Hazel Fall’s costume designs are a Tudor delight and Craig Kilmartin’s lighting design plays to daylight’s progress into night. Out of view, to the side, apart from musical director Madeleine Hudson’s outstretched arms, is the choir, but their contribution is vital, commenting in song on what is ensuing through Dominic Sales’s wonderful compositions.

Yes, Sovereign could be shorter, and in a future staging it probably would be, but Mike Kenny has worked his Midas touch once more. York Theatre Royal is ahead of the game too: a television series of Sansom’s stories is on its way.

York giving Fat Harry the proverbial two fingers will live long in the memory.

Box office for returns only: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

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Bee Scott unveils queer sci-fi travelogue at Connect Festival tonight. Are you ready to play your part in a night of choices?

Bee Scott’s poster for tonight’s Connect Festival performance of If You Find This

QUEER science fiction theatre maker and University of York researcher Bee Scott presents the premiere of her new play, If You Find This, at Theatre@41, Monkgate, tonight (20/7/2023).

Forming part of the Innovate strand at Four Wheel Drive Theatre’s Connect Festival, the 50-minute interactive sci-fi travelogue invites audiences to make choices leading them to one of three possible endings each night.

“My production plays with game mechanics that let the audience change how they explore the universe, depending on what it is they hope to find. When you imagine the future, do you hope for love, adventure, or comfort in the familiar?” asks Bee.

What happens in If You Find This? “Earth is trashed, but space is vast! And you’ve stumbled on a bunch of messages from the first human intergalactic hitchhiker telling you exactly how to chart your way to safety,” says Bee.

All the messages seem to be addressed to her girlfriend. “They’re kind of private, but it’s probably fine? This is for survival,” says Bee. “The messages are a little jumbled up. But you’re smart and you’ve played those make-a-choice Netflix episodes before. Finding your way through the cosmos along with the other remnants of humanity should be easy. If she could make it, you can too, right?”

As for Bee’s own progress, born to an English father and American mother in Sacramento, the “city of trees” in California, Bee studied theatre at Occidental College, Eagle Rock, the only small liberal arts college in Los Angeles.

Holding dual citizenship, she moved to the UK in 2014 to do an MA in music theatre at Central School of Speech and Drama. Performances at the Edinburgh Fringe, voiceover work and new writing pieces in the sci-fi sphere ensued, leading to her first full-length play, Mission Creep, being mounted by Controlled Chaos Theatre Company in London after being developed from a series of 15-minute extracts with various companies.

Bee had been working front of house at the Old Vic too and had just started afternoon shifts as a receptionist for Hospice UK when the pandemic struck. “We still kept phonelines operational, so we were very, very busy, but I never worked at their office,” she says. “I only visited it for the interview and never saw those people again! Everything went onto Zoom.”

Controlled Chaos Theatre Company in Bee Scott’s Mission Creep in 2019

During lockdown too, Bee was working on a proposal for her PhD. “I got in touch with Louise LePage at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, who’d been a speaker at an event I’d helped with, where she looked at robot actors.”

Bee duly left “lockdown London” for York two years ago to study for her creative practice PhD on the subject of “How we imagine the future of queer people through science-fiction theatre”.

“It’s been a mixture of looking back and looking forward as science-fiction always looks to the future, but then you can look back at how it influenced what we ended up doing, as well as looking at how those predictions worked out,” says Bee.

“I would say the easiest way to consider queer sci-fi is through the characters, for example the San Junipero episode in Black Mirror. The 2010s had a lot of queer sci-fi and audiences were primed and ready for it.

“Russell T Davies planted the seeds early in Doctor Who and has had such an influence on queer sci-fi culture, and there’s a lot happening in literature too.”

Historically, Bee says, the queer character is seen as the outsider. “The default position has the heroic white man as the main character, with the colonial settler narrative of going out and conquering the world,” she says.

“Whereas now writers can explore things from more perspectives with more people coming forward to offer their view, and that’s something that If You Find This plays with.”

For her PhD, Bee’s first step has been to “dive into queer theory in theatre and contemporary literature”. “I’ve refracted that theory through theatre and then, since last term, I’ve been able to mess around was able to mess around with interactive theatre, working with another practitioner, Anna Gallon, when she did a VR [virtual reality] musical in March,” she says.

Writer and performer Bee Scott

“This interactive element is new for me, and If You Find This is my chance to get my feet wet with this form of theatre.”

If You Find This is a solo piece but with more than one central character. “There are two main characters and depending on the ending we arrive at, there could be a third character. Those alternative endings depend on how the audience on how the audience chooses to interact with other life forms,” says Bee.

“The way the play ends with all those different endings possible tells you there is a very definite sense that this exploration of where one is in the universe never finishes. There’s a lot in the play about finding home, finding a place of safety, and that’s not only for humans.”

Expect minimalism in Bee’s performance. “I’m a big fan of it, and it’s one of the most powerful things about sci-fi theatre,” she reasons.

Expect unpredictability too. “Tonight will be its first outing, and I want to see how it plays with an audience. I want to see how the audience vote works,” says Bee.

“There’s a ‘Game Master’ element to the show, the mechanism for choice that facilitates the options available to the audience and then guides them through each option they choose.

“But the interactive element is quite gentle. I’m not putting anyone on the spot. It’s a group effort. No spotlights!”

As for sci-fi’s desire to head into space, to expand our reach beyond Earth, Bee says: “It’s been interesting to watch certain people with all their money explore that vision of space travel, but I don’t think we’ll quite get there in my lifetime. Maybe in another generation after that. It feels like we need to clean up our own mess first.”

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, Bee is working on another project: making audio dramas. Watch this space…and watch Space too.  

Natasha Stanic Mann in The Return, tonight’s 8.45pm performance at the Connect Festival

IF You Find This forms part of Connect Festival’s Non-Linear Narratives night at Theatre@41, Monkgate, York. At 8.45pm, Natasha Stanic Mann performs her devised one-woman show, The Return, an immersive insight into the hidden consequences of war, directed by Andres Velasquez.

“The beaches are lovely. Remembering is crass, embarrassing and in poor taste. But to remember is to return,” says Natasha. “If we cannot return, where do we start from? Come to laugh, to cry and to feel awkward. Whatever it is, we will survive it – survival being an art. Or an embarrassment?”

The story, based on the experience of living in Croatia during the break-up of former Yugoslavia, is fragmented and collaged. “It unveils an aspect of family history and explores the surreal circumstances around a conflict building up and what goes into surviving it,” says Natasha.

Combining movement, storytelling and poetry, her piece explores how living through war has affected where Natasha is now.

Bee Scott: If You Find This, 7.30pm tonight; Natasha Stanic Mann: The Return, 8.45pm tonight, Connect Festival, Theatre@41 Monkgate, York. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

Connect Festival: “Enabling audiences to connect with one another and with new work”

Four Wheel Drive’s Connect Festival: the 2023 back story

“TO us, enabling audiences to connect with one another and with new work is invigorating,” say Connect Festival organisers Four Wheel Drive.

Running from July 19 to 23 at Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, the festival aims to connect York-based creatives with one another and the next stage in their career. 

This week’s event not only connects York creatives with like-minded individuals and industry experts, but also enables networking across disciplines, as live arts, digital media and innovative technology connect to celebrate this city’s creative communities.

Connect Festival offers York creatives the chance to broaden their horizons and network with others

Connect Festival offers opportunities for people in York to connect with York’s creative and cultural scene. Festival guests include: Ben Porter, founder of NODE and York Creatives; Mary Stewart David, of Imminent XR; freelance York playwright and comedy sketch writer Paul Birch; Joe Rees-Jones, of XR Stories, and award-winning audio drama producer Kate Valentine.

Masterclasses, workshops, networking events and panels during the day and early evening offer York creatives the chance to broaden their horizons and network with others who share the same passions. 

The evenings present theatrical performances, followed by late-night entertainment on selected days. After Friday evening’s two comedies, Joe Maddalena and Gianluca Scatto’s Self Help and Aidan Loft’s On The Rail, Freida Nipples Burlesque hosts burlesque performances of glitz and glamour in A Night With York’s Stars.

In the frame: Joly Black and Anna Gallon, Four Wheel Drive’s co-producers for the Connect Festival, in the doorway of Theatre@41, Monkgate, York

Following Saturday’s LGBTQ+ performances, Josh Maughan’s Nice Jewish Boy and Aidan Thompson-Coates in the collaborative work Contradicktion, the Family Shambles Drag troupe will be in action. Both evenings have limited tickets and are predicted to sell out fast.

Connect co-producer Anna Gallon is passionate about welcoming everyone to the festival, be they from a theatrical background or not: “If you want to pursue your creativity, then my question would be: why not? This is a positive and inspiring space where we want to know what you are creating and what you are interested in,” she says.

The programme for the 2023 Connect Festival

For co-producer Joly Black, this ties in with accessibility: “The success of Connect is all about opportunity; I want to create as many opportunities for people to learn, exploring their creativity in a low-risk environment, and build their network to step up their career,” he says.

“But in the end, if you want to be connected with the next stage of your career – theatrical or otherwise – to experiment with new technologies while meeting new people, or simply have a great time watching vibrant performances, come on down to the Connect Festival. We’ve got something for everyone!

“You can browse tickets at www.connectyork.co.uk with free events available. Book now to avoid disappointment as tickets are very limited.”

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More Things To Do in York and beyond when Connecting with culture. Here Hutch’s List No. 29 for 2023, from The Press

Shed Seven, 2023: Vocalist Rick Witter, left, guitarist Paul Banks, second from right, and bassist Tom Gladwin,right, are joined by drummer Rob ‘Maxi’ Maxfield and keyboardist Tim Willis at Millennium Square,Leeds, tonight. Picture: Barnaby Fairley

GOING for gold, whether with the Sheds or down at the maze, Charles Hutchinson heads outdoors but is drawn back indoors too.

Outdoor gig of the weekend: Shed Seven, Sounds In The City 2023, Millennium Square, Leeds, today, from 6pm

FRESH from announcing next January’s release of their sixth studio album, A Matter Of Time, York’s Shed Seven head to Leeds city centre for a sold-out, 6,00-capacity Millennium Square show.

Performing alongside regular vocalist Rick Witter, guitarist Paul Banks and bassist Tom Gladwin will be Tim Willis on keyboards and Rob ‘Maxi’ Maxfield on drums. Support slots go to fellow Britpop veterans Cast and rising York band Skylights.

Be amazed: York Maze reopens for a new season today

Opening of the weekend: York Maze, Elvington Lane, Elvington, near York, today until September 4

THE Cobsleigh Run race and Crowmania ride are among the new attractions when York Maze opens for its 21st season today with a new show marquee too – and the giant image of Tutankhamun cut by farmer Tom Pearcy into a 15-acre field of maize.

Created from one million living, growing maize plants, Britain’s largest maze has more than 20 rides, attractions and shows for a fun-filled family day out. Where else would you find a Corntroller of Entertainment, corny pun intended? Step forward Josh Benson, York magician, pantomime star and, yes, corntroller. Tickets: 01904 608000 or yorkmaze.com.

Gary Stewart: Celebrating the songs of Paul Simon at Helmsley Arts Centre

Show title of the week: Gary Stewart, The Only Living Boy In (New) York – An Evening of Paul Simon Songs, Helmsley Arts Centre, tonight, 7.30pm

GARY Stewart, singer, songwriter, guitarist, Hope & Social drummer and programmer for At The Mill’s folk bills, turns the spotlight on the songs of New Yorker Paul Simon, his chief folk/pop influence.

Born in Perthshire, Stewart cut his Yorkshire teeth on the Leeds music scene for 15 years before moving to York (and now Easingwold, to be precise). He is sometimes to be found fronting his Graceland show, another vessel for Paul Simon songs. Tonight, his focus is on The Boxer, Mrs Robinson, Me & Julio Down By The Schoolyard, Kodachrome et al.  Box office: 01439 771700 or helmsleyarts.co.uk.

The Young’uns: Playing Ryedale Festival on July 20 at 7pm at the Milton Rooms, Malton. Picture: Pamela Raith

Festival of the week outside York: Ryedale Festival, running until July 30

DIRECTED once more by Christopher Glynn, Ryedale Festival returns with 55 concerts, celebrating everything from Tchaikovsky to troubadours in beautiful North Yorkshire locations. Artists in residence include Anna Lapwood, Nicky Spence, Korean violinist Bomsori Kim and pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen.

Taking part too will be Boris Giltburg, the Dudok Quartet, Jess Gillam, Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, guitarist Plínio Fernandes,trumpeter Aaron Akugbo, pianist George Xiaoyuan Fu, the National Youth Choir of Scotland, jazz singer Clare Teal and north eastern folk musicians The Young’uns, among others. For the full programme and tickets, go to: reydalefestival.com.

Mark Thomas: Performing one-man play England And Son at Selby Town Hall on Sunday. Picture: Tony Pletts

Work in Progress of the week: Mark Thomas in England And Son, Selby Town Hall, Sunday, 7.30pm

POLITICAL comedian Mark Thomas stars in this one-man play, set when The Great Devouring comes home: the first he has performed not written by the polemicist himself but by award-winning playwright Ed Edwards.

Directed by Cressida Brown, England And Son has emerged from characters Thomas knew in his childhood and from Edwards’s lived experience in jail. Promising deep, dark laughs and deep, dark love, Thomas undertakes a kaleidoscopic odyssey where disaster capitalism, Thatcherite politics and stolen wealth merge into the simple tale of a working-class boy who just wants his dad to smile at him. Box office: 01757 708449 or selbytownhall.co.uk.

Bee Scott: Presenting her queer sci-fi interactive travelogue If You Find This at Connect Festival on Thursday

Festival of the week in York: Four Wheel Drive presents Connect Festival, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, Wednesday to Sunday

FOUR Wheel Drive’s Connect Festival opens with Women’s Voices on Wednesday, staging two new shows, Giorgia Test’s Behind My Scars and Rhia Burston’s Woebegone. Thursday’s Non-Linear Narratives features Bee Scott’s queer sci-fi interactive travelogue If You Find This and Natasha Stanic Mann’s immersive insight into hidden consequences of war, The Return.

Friday’s Comedy and Burlesque bill presents Joe Maddalena in Gianluca Scatto and Maddalena’s dark comedy about male mental health, Self Help, Aidan Loft’s night-train drama On The Rail and A Night With York’s Stars burlesque show, fronted by Freida Nipples. More details next weekend. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

Four Forty Theatre’s cast for the Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet comedy doube bill: Amy Roberts, Luke Thornton, Dom Gee-Burch and Amy Merivale

Unhinged comedy of the week: Four Forty Theatre in Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, Thursday, 7.30pm

MACBETH in 40 minutes? Romeo & Juliet in 40 minutes? Both shows performed by only four actors on one raucous night? Yes, welcome back Four Forty Theatre, returning to the JoRo with a brace of Shakespeare’s tragedies transformed into an outrageous, flat-out comedy double bill.

In the line-up will be actress and primary school teacher Alice Merivale; Liverpool actress, musician, director, vocal coach and piano teacher Amy Roberts; company debutant actor-musician Luke Thornton and company director and pantomime dame Dom Gee-Burch. Box office: 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.

The poster for Legend – The Music Of Bob Marley

Tribute show of the week: Legend – The Music of Bob Marley, York Barbican, Thursday, 7.30pm

LEGEND celebrates the reggae music of Jamaican icon Bob Marley in a two-hour Rasta spectacular. “Don’t worry about a thing, ’cause every little thing is gonna be alright” when the cast re-creates No Woman No Cry,  Could You Be Loved, Is This Love, One Love, Three Little Birds, Jammin’, Buffalo Soldier, Get Up Stand Up and I Shot The Sheriff. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.

Jorgie Willingham’s Referee and Jim Carnall’s boxer Paul Stokes in rehearsal for The Sweet Science Of Bruising at York Theatre Royal. Picture: James Harvey

Knock-out show of the week: York College BA (Hons) Acting for Stage and Screen Graduating Students in The Sweet Science Of Bruising, York Theatre Royal, Thursday and Friday, 7.30pm

JOY Wilkinson’s The Sweet Science Of Bruising is an epic tale of passion, politics and pugilism in the world of 19th-century women’s boxing, staged by York College students.

In London, 1869, four very different Victorian women are drawn into the dark underground of female boxing by the eccentric Professor Sharp. Controlled by men and constrained by corsets, each finds an unexpected freedom in the boxing ring as they fight inequality as well as each other. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

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How Sarah-Louise Young finds her voice, stronger than ever, in The Silent Treatment

Sarah-Louise Young: “I have made this show from a place of strength and recovery,” she says. “It is ultimately a very positive story of resilience and healing”. Picture: Steve Ullathorne

WARNING: Sarah-Louise Young’s show in York tomorrow night, The Silent Treatment, includes themes of trauma and sexual violence.

After her celebrations of Kate Bush (An Evening Without…) and Julie Andrews (Julie Madly Deeply), the Canterbury-born writer-performer returns to Theatre@41, Monkgate, with the highly personal true story of a singer who loses her voice and embarks on an unexpected journey of self-revelation and vocal healing.

In a career as a musical theatre actress, singer, writer, director, Showstopper! improviser and cabaret performer with Fascinating Aida, Sarah-Louise had “always known something wasn’t right with my voice but, like many singers, I assumed it was my fault,” as she revealed to the Guardian in June last year, ahead of the show’s Edinburgh Fringe run. “When a singer loses their voice we question their technique, their lifestyle, even their commitment.”

She had to hide how, every few months, her soprano voice would disappear, inducing a paralysing shame until it returned after few days’ rest. Then, after 11 years of ceaseless performing, “secret collapse and hidden recovery”, she lost her voice on stage mid-performance. “I was mortified,” she told the Guardian.

A consultant discovered cysts, probably there since childhood, he suggested, prompting him to ask Sarah-Louise if anything in her childhood – expressly before she was ten – could have traumatised her voice.

The answer was yes; she was sexually attacked at the age of seven, in daylight. “After the initial distress, I never gave it much thought. But the hand on my mouth, the stifled scream…what the mind forgets, the body remembers,” she wrote in her Guardian piece.

Self-care was advised, coffee became a no-no, work flowed, but after three years, her surgeon deemed an operation was necessary after her cysts burst when performing Julie Madly Deeply through bronchitis for six weeks.

Now there was something else to hide: she would be considered “damaged goods” if it became known she had undergone surgery, or so the “industry gatekeepers” forewarned. Stay silent? No, vowed Sarah-Louise, and nine years on, The Silent Treatment is her story, her voice found anew and her diary busier than ever at 47.

Sarah-Louise Young: “The first time I sang after the operation it was like night and day from singing pre-surgery”. Picture: Steve Ullathorne

Here Sarah-Louise discusses singing, healing and dealing with what life throws at you with CharlesHutchPress.

What has been the reaction to The Silent Treatment, especially to your revelations about the sexual attack you suffered aged seven?

“The audience and critical response has been overwhelmingly positive. Whenever I make a new show, especially one which is autobiographical, I ask myself the same question: why should anyone care?

“So although the details of the story are personal to me, it connects with many other people’s lived experiences of being silenced, singers and non-singers alike.

“In terms of the sexual attack, my brilliant director Sioned Jones and I spent a lot of time discussing how best to portray it without sensationalising it or traumatising anyone watching.

“Close friends who didn’t know about it were understandably moved or concerned when they watched it but I have made this show from a place of strength and recovery. It is ultimately a very positive story of resilience and healing.” 

How do you structure this show?

“Without giving too much away about the piece, I play several different characters, ranging from my suave surgeon to a fruity diaphragm. It’s part quest, part journey into the past. It’s definitely not a conventional linear narrative but you’ll have to come along and see it to find out more.” 

Where do songs fit in?

“Music is important and I was lucky enough to work with a fabulous composer called Chris Ash who I knew from Showstopper! The Improvised Musical. He created beautiful soundscapes for the different worlds of the piece, including scenes which take place inside the human body. He even sampled my voice electronically to add to the mix.

“I write the lyrics and we worked together on the songs, which were all created originally for the show to serve different moments. For example, the cysts get their own big solo number, which is great fun.” 

An Evening Without Kate Bush and Julie Madly Deeply both had personal elements within them, but this is your most personal show. How does that feel when you perform it?

“I love connecting with an audience and have found with both of those shows that the more generous and open hearted I am, the more the audience will join me. It’s always a privilege to perform for people who have chosen to spend their time with you and the fact that they are invested in my journey is of course very rewarding for me.

“Most importantly, I want them to see themselves reflected back and find a universal meaning within the story.” 

Both the Bush and Andrews shows were joyous. What is the tone of The Silent Treatment?

“It’s funny, surreal, intimate and heartfelt, incorporating songs, stories, characterisation, puppetry, movement and mime. There’s a lot going on and while I’m required to give the show a trigger warning due to its sensitive thematic content, I hope I have created a piece of cabaret which is uplifting and entertaining.” 

Will there be any audience participation?

“Much less than in my other shows! I chat to the audience as they enter the space and collect tongue-twisters from them. The show is very much performed to them without a fourth wall, but I don’t invite anyone up onto the stage. Well, not yet anyway!” 

“I believe it’s a story which needed to be told and I know I’m not alone in this,” says Sarah-Louise

When did you first find your voice, not the prescribed musical theatre voice?

“I think I found my voice as a child, before I was aware of training. It was free and playful. It took many years later on in life to re-discover that sense of play. I had a fantastic singing teacher, Maureen Scott, who guided me through my surgery and a wonderful vocal therapist called Dr Rehab afterwards.

“Our voices change and develop as we age and making this show has really empowered me to sing with my own authentic voice. I love singing Kate Bush and Julie Andrews’ songs too and enjoy the vocal gymnastics of switching between styles.” 

Did you have to re-find your voice after the operation for the cysts?

“I did a month of vocal therapy six times a day. The minimum recovery time from surgery is four weeks and I only had four weeks and a day before opening in Julie Madly Deeply in Toronto, so I had to focus entirely on getting match fit.

“The first time I sang after the operation it was like night and day from singing pre-surgery. My voice has been strong and happy since then and I’ve never looked back.” 

Describe a singer’s fear of being treated as damaged goods after an operation…

“At the time I felt vulnerable and also very angry because I knew it wasn’t true. It was someone else’s idea which I had absorbed. Singers get injuries just like athletes and there was no reason for me to feel any different.

“What happens to us is not our shame and I should never have been made to feel embarrassed or that I needed to hide the truth. The Silent Treatment is my response to being told I needed to stay quiet about my experience. I believe it’s a story which needed to be told and I know I’m not alone in this.” 

“What the mind forgets, the body remembers,” you say. How have you dealt with that psychologically and physically?

“I’ve been through talking therapy and practice movement as part of my creative process. Our bodies have an incredible higher wisdom and if we listen to them, they will often guide us in the right direction.

“I’ve been mentoring a number of other artists recently and one of the things we explore is readiness to tell your story. Although the rehearsal room can feel therapeutic at times, the performer must be on the right side of therapy before they share that work with a paying audience.

“It must be safe for them and their public to perform the show. If it isn’t, in my opinion, then you might not be ready yet.”

The voice is the most vulnerable, personal, unpredictable instrument, even by comparison with a highly-strung guitar or piano. The only human instrument too.

Why are we not more understanding of its delicate nature for performers, who often pray to “Dr Theatre” to continue performing, as you did for so many years?

“Unless you are fortunate enough to have a laryngoscopy, the voice remains invisible to most people. It is a mysterious instrument and everyone’s voice is unique to them.

“I hope for the next generation of performers there will be more compassion and understanding moving forward,” says Sarah-Louise. Picture: Steve Ullathorne

“Some singers swear by gargling with cider vinegar, others smoke 20 cigarettes a day and still sing like an angel (although this isn’t a behaviour I endorse for obvious reasons).

“History also has fetishised singers who push themselves to the edge: Judy Garland, Edith Piaf, Amy Winehouse, for example. How can these incredible voices come from such damaged people?

“We love watching people on the edge, on a tightrope, and when they fall, we make them martyrs for their art.

“It’s getting better for performers now, partly thanks to high-profile artists like Adele going public with their vocal challenges and partly, I think, because in general we’re waking up to the importance of looking after our mental health.

“Our voices and our well-being are intrinsically linked, and I hope for the next generation of performers there will be more compassion and understanding moving forward.

“I was chatting to the principal of an Australian musical theatre course recently and he told me they get all their students scoped in the first term, so not only do they see and understand their voices, but they also have a visual record for the rest of their careers to refer back to if they run into any difficulties.

“Had that been available to me all those years ago, I might have discovered my issue decades earlier.” 

Did your voice change after the cysts were removed?

“The tone and sound was the same, but it was much stronger and I don’t have any breathiness any more, even when I’m tired.” 

How does your voice behave now?

“It’s a joy to sing and I have no concerns whatsoever.” 

How do you take care of your voice on tour, at the Fringe etc?

“Out of habit from so many years of looking after myself, I tend not to drink alcohol when I’m working but that is as much about mental clarity as vocal care. I used to have acid reflux but I don’t any more, so I mainly focus on getting good sleep, staying hydrated and warming down after a show as well as warming up.” 

Are you off to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer?

“I’ll be there for the first week to bed-in two shows I’ve directed: Gertrude Lawrence – A Lovely Way To Spend An Evening, with Lucy Stevens, and Kravitz, Cohen, Bernstein And Me with Deb Filler. I’ll also be running a drop-in for solo performers on August 7, offering solidarity and support to artists on their own.” 

Sarah-Louise Young in The Silent Treatment, Theatre@41, Monkgate, tomorrow (16/7/2023), 7pm. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

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REVIEW: Amerrycan Theatre in Our Town, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York ****

The wedding: Emily Belcher’s Emily Webb marries Frankie Bounds’s George Gibbs in a ceremony conducted by Rory Mulvihill’s Congregational Church minister, right, in Amerrycan Theatre’s Our Town. Looking on, left, are Damian M O’Connor’s Constable Bill Warren and Charlotte Hewitson’s Rebecca Gibbs

RORY Mulvihill’s avuncular Stage Manager – a narrator, ringmaster, master of ceremonies and Cassandra rolled into one – talks of the stars “doing their old, old crisscross journeys” since four billion years ago.

You could call Thornton Wilder’s Our Town a time play, not in the manner of Bradford playwright J B Priestley’s Time Plays of the 1930s and 1940s, but because of the importance of time and using it well.

As director Bryan Bounds said afterwards: “The third act is the glass of water in the face to say, ‘Wake up, this is all going to be gone before you realise it’.”

Ironically, neither Mulvihill’s measured, mellifluous Stage Manager nor Wilder’s play, with its two intervals rather than the customary one, is in a particular hurry. The watch is ticking well past 10pm as we leave, more than two and a half hours after our arrival, but rest assured, time spent in the company of Wilder and “Yorkshire’s American theatre company” is time spent well indeed, particularly after that remarkable, rug-pulling third act.

Our Town has been called “America’s greatest play”, and while your reviewer does not have the time to debate that contention here, the likes of David Mamet and Edward Albee, no less, speak of this 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner that highly.

Advance publicity had suggested Amerrycan Theatre’s modern-dressed production was a very belated York premiere for Our Town, but it has since come to light that Rowntree Players presented it in the late 1950s, the actor who played young lead George Gibbs now in his 80s.

Nevertheless, that remains a long, long hiatus since its only York production, an act of neglect frankly. Not that you would feel that way after the gentle loosener of the first act, where Mulvihill leads a guided tour of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, population, 2,642.

Everyone knows everyone and their business in this little American town with its quietly competitive churches, railway, blanket factory and all-in-one town hall, post office and jail .

Wilder is presenting a microcosm of American life, much like Dylan Thomas’s portrait of the mythical Welsh seaside village of LLareggub in his 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, but Thomas’s play spanned only 24 hours, whereas Wilder’s three acts span 12 years from 1906 to 1918, rather than the original 1901 to 1913, in Bounds’s account with intervals of three years from Daily Life (May 7 1906) to Act Two’s Love and Marriage (July 7 1909) and nine more to Act Three’s Death and Eternity (Autumn 1918, originally Summer 1913).

A cast of 14 populates Our Town, some from York, others from Leeds and Harrogate, one born in Tasmania, Bounds originally from Temple, Texas, and his computer engineer friend, Thomas Miller, from southern Illinois, in his first foray into acting since university days. Just as we grow to know Wilder’s characters, an interval read of the programme profiles reveals plenty too, each accompanied by a black-and-white photograph from childhood days.

Our Town is deemed a radical play, not only in breaking down theatre’s fourth wall for Mulvihill to ask various (primed) audience members questions about Grover’s Corners, and in its lack of props and rudimentary scenery, but also in its bravura use of dead people – yes, you can see dead people a la The Sixth Sense – who rise from their graves to take seats to conduct Act Three from beyond.

Here, these dead souls of the cemetery discuss life’s transience, as Craig Kirby’s suicidal drunkard, the now late choirmaster Simon Stimson, scalds the living for their ignorance and bliss in Wilder’s  bleaker, blacker version of Jaques’ monologue in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Bleaker still, they castigate the grieving George (spoiler alert) for wasting his time in visiting the graveyard.

Everything is milk and roses on the surface in Act One, even in the Sentinel newspaper run by the upright Mr Charles Webb (Andrew Isherwood), but gradually more than small-town gossip prevails. The women are not happy to be subservient; young Wally Webb (Harrison Turner-Hazel, a name for an actor if ever there were one!) must go off to war; symbolically, Kirby’s erratic Stimson tells the ladies of the Congregational Church choir (Jess Murray’s outstanding Mrs Myrtle Webb among them) that they sing too loudly.

At the play’s core is a love story, one of young lovers, neighbours George Gibbs (Frankie Bounds), the sports jock, and Emily Webb (Emily Belcher), the brightest pupil at school. The Romeo and Juliet of Wilder’s world, their courtship scenes are a delight, but the marriage ceremony shocks: a forewarning of Act Three’s darkness to come. Bounds junior and Belcher are terrific in those scenes, and Belcher is better still in the play’s stark climax.

America’s greatest play? You decide, but your first decision should be to visit Our Town and its story of everyday life and the extraordinary in the ordinary, but hurry, it will soon be leaving town.

Amerrycan Theatre in Our Town, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, 7.30pm tonight and tomorrow; 2.30pm and 7.30pm, Saturday. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

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Once he studied history and politics in York. Now Sam Thorpe-Spinks stars in Henry VIII mystery thriller Sovereign at King’s Manor

Sam Thorpe-Spinks looks forward to performing Sovereign – “a crime drama in situ” – at King’s Manor. Picture: Alex Holland

SAM Thorpe-Spinks first made his mark on the York stage scene in student productions while reading History and Politics at the University of York.

He later trained at Guildhall School of Music and Drama and now returns to the city as one of two professional actors leading a 100-strong community cast and choir in York playwright Mike Kenny’s adaptation of C J Sansom’s Tudor-set thriller, Sovereign.

PlayingJewish sidekick Jack Barak to Irish actor Fergus Rattigan’s disabled lawyer Matthew Shardlake in the York Theatre Royal co-production with the University of York, Sam’s role just happens to combine history and politics, as well as murder and mystery, in a story to be staged outdoors at King’s Manor, one of the key locations in Sansom’s novel, from Saturday (15/7/2023) to July 30.

“That’s why doing this play is interesting, having studied History and Politics at university here from 2011 to 2014. I remember being at Clifford’s Tower one night from three till five in the morning and not realising its historical significance at the time,” he recalls.

“My Jewishness is something I’ve only rediscovered in the past five years. My mother’s side of the family escaped the pogrom in the early 20th century, went to Belfast and set up a synagogue there.

“When I was at drama school, I was aware of antisemitism in the theatre world. Before that, my grandmother, Gillian Freeman, wrote the novel The Leather Boys [1961] and the screenplay [for Sidney J Furie’s 1964 film], writing the book based on her Jewish history.

“I got in touch with my Jewishness culturally, rather than through faith, and last year I set up Emanate with my friend Dan Wolff [his fellow actor-producer] to champion new Jewish writing. Last August, we sold out a two-night run of six short scenes by Jewish writers at the Kiln Theatre (formerly the Tricycle Theatre), and we’ll be going to the Soho Theatre (London) in August for two weeks with three new plays by Alexis Zegerman, Ryan Craig and Amy Rosenthal, exploring birth, marriage and death.

Sam Thorpe-Spinks playing a soldier in Quicksand at York Theatre Royal’s TakeOver festival in his University of York days

”So, my Jewish curiosity has filtered its way into my work. Once I finish Sovereign on the Sunday (30/7/20230), I’ll start rehearsals on the Monday for Alexis’s play, The Arc, the one that looks at marriage.”

Since June 14, his focus has been on rehearsals for Sovereign, linking up with Theatre Royal creative director Juliet Forster and co-directors John R Wilkinson and Mingyu Lin’s community cast, whose rehearsal schedule for this summer’s world premiere had begun in March.

“Jack Barak is the Dr Watson role, the assistant, and there’s been a lot of fun acting alongside Fergus’s detective. Barak is certainly more the lovable rogue character of the detective duo. He’s not a strong man but he’s lot more equipped to sniff out trouble and deal with it – and he has a charming propensity to find women for himself,” says the six-foot tall, blue/green-eyed, black-haired Sam.

“He has a little love interest in the play that leads him into trouble, but the book series concludes with him marrying and having children, so he does learn about love!”

Kenny’s adaptation focuses on Sansom’s story of lawyer Shardlake and Barak being sent from London to York to await the arrival of Henry VIII at King’s Manor, only to be plunged into a mystery that could threaten the future of the crown when a York glazier is murdered.

“It’s such a privilege to be performing at King’s Manor,” says Sam. “Normally you have to use your imagination, but I don’t have to use any for this! York is steeped in Tudor times, and to be appearing in a play performed where the story happened is quite rare.

“The Minster is a constant reminder of the city’s history, so you can never escape the play, and that’s a good thing.”

Lead actors Fergus Rattigan, left, and Sam Thorpe-Spinks at King’s Manor, York, where Mike Kenny’s adaptation of C J Sansom’s best seller will be staged from Saturday. Picture: Alex Holland

As for Henry VIII, already given a hard time in SIX The Musical at the Grand Opera House in late June, “they hate Henry in York, or certainly they do in this play,” says Sam. “He’s a southerner trying to exert his southern ways on the north, and both Shardlake and Barak are from the south too, so they’re treated with suspicion as well.”

Sovereign is Sam’s third play since leaving drama school, in the wake of Emanate and Peter Gill’s Something In The Air (Jermyn Street Theatre, London). “It’s the first one I’ve done on this scale, with so many cast members,” he says.

“The way Mike Kenny has adapted such a vast novel, bringing the characters into a palatable play that you can follow easily, he’s done an amazing job, keeping it really lean to the bone, and it feels like a play that was born to be performed by a community cast.

“You should see it because it’s a rich and colourful portrait of York in the 16th century, with murders, blood, treason and romance, and a cast of 100-plus performing in the actual location where the story took place. A crime drama in situ!”

No need for a sales pitch: Sovereign has sold out already.

York Theatre Royal and University of York present Sovereign outdoors at King’s Manor, Exhibition Square, York, from July 15 to 30. Tickets update: Sold out. Box office, for returns only,  01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

Copyright of The Press, York

Sam Thorpe-Spinks

What’s in a name? Sam Thorpe-Spinks

Sam: Hebrew origin, meaning “told by God” and “God hears”.

Thorpe: Derived from Old Norse or Old English, denoting a hamlet or village. Many place names in England have the suffix “thorp” or “thorpe”. Those of Old Norse origin abound in Yorkshire, Northumberland, County Durham, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk.

Spinks: ‘Spink’ (noun) denotes a finch or the sound of a particular bird cry. ‘Spink’ (verb) denotes a finch calling or chirping or making a characteristic sound.