Monthly Archives: July 2014

Liverpool Empire’s Stage Experience Showcases Cats This August.

Tickets for the Liverpool Empire’s Stage Experience project for 2014 are now on sale. Over 100 young people from the local area will work with a professional creative team to stage a production of the much-loved musical Cats.

Based on T.S Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and award-winning music composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the show tells a story of fantasy, drama and romance set on the night of the Jellicle Ball.

Stage Experience is an annual two week summer school programme delivered by the Creative Learning department at the Liverpool Empire and during which, over 100 lucky young people will work alongside industry professionals to stage a full scale musical production in just two weeks.

Liverpool Empire’s Stage Experience Showcases Cats This August. full post

(402 words, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)

The Boomtown Rats To Perform at Liverpool’s 02 Academy This October.

After last year’s storming of the Isle of Wight Festival stage an exhilarated Bob Geldof said “It’s weird. I’d forgotten how powerful a band The Rats are!”

Others hadn’t.  What was only meant to be a brief “re-grouping” turned into a triumphant sell out U.K. tour, a block-booked 2014 Festival season and now the announcement of ‘Ratlife’ the second half of The Boomtown Rats’ second coming.  Taking in the towns missed out on their first jaunt and returning – literally by public demand – to the country’s major cities so thoroughly re-Ratted six months ago.  Beyond nostalgia both press and audience agreed that those many classic Ratsongs had indeed stood the test of time morphing from the radical, upstart transgressive rage of the mid-70’s into tunes for the ages with a tragic contemporary resonance.

The Boomtown Rats To Perform at Liverpool’s 02 Academy This October. full post

(495 words, estimated 1:59 mins reading time)

F.I.F.A. World Cup 2014, Holland V Mexico, Match Report.

Originally published by Ace Magazine online. June 2014.

Holland playing against Mexico, perhaps one in which the purist and the hopeful could both savour the football that was surely to be placed before an awaiting world, or at least that cared about such matters and who weren’t enthralled by the arrival of Dolly Parton at Glastonbury or the more serious topics surrounding the battlegrounds that used to resemble Iraq and Syria and the tension that grumbles on between the European Union, Russia and the Ukraine.

F.I.F.A. World Cup 2014, Holland V Mexico, Match Report. full post

(1771 words, estimated 7:05 mins reading time)

F.I.F.A. World Cup 2014. Costa Rica V Greece, Match Report.

First published by Ace Magazine, Liverpool online. June 2014.

The land of fantasy is at times such an intriguing place to let your mind wander off to. In the world of fantasy anybody can become a hero; the least likely person can walk into the sunset with their head held high having saved another’s life or the hopes of a nation. Whilst nobody on the pitch in Recife surely thought for a single minute they would be the one to take on the might of established convention, the potency of F.I.F.A.’s tight grip on the game, fantasy became reality as Costa Rica, destroyers of football establishment in the likes of Italy, Uruguay, by then unfancied and England, made the quarter finals of the 2014 World Cup by beating the equally surprised last 16 cohorts Greece.

F.I.F.A. World Cup 2014. Costa Rica V Greece, Match Report. full post

(1610 words, estimated 6:26 mins reading time)

Gaffer, Theatre Review. Unity Theatre, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Simon Hedger.

Life’s a pitch for a good manager, in the testosterone filled world of football, there is the hard work but also the banter, the great times of winning a trophy or two, of the desperate times in which a club can come so close to extinction that it threatens a whole community, it can destabilise it to the point where it may never recover. A club’s fortunes doesn’t just depend on what happens on the pitch, with the supporters or indeed with the person who bank rolls it all, it depends on the everyday making headway and for supposed social stigma’s to be recognised as just life. There is no wrong in being different; if you can do the job then you are good enough, no matter who you are.

Gaffer, Theatre Review. Unity Theatre, Liverpool. full post

(480 words, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)