Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Acclaimed opera singer and cabaret star Le Gateau Chocolat brought a brilliantly intimate new solo show to the Unity Theatre as part of Liverpool’s ongoing homotopia festival occuring throughout the city as he charted his personal difficulties and triumphs with depression, identity and music.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Gillian Hardie, Keddy Sutton.
With a song in their hearts…well, more of a set of tunes and harmonies that has been lovingly taken from one of the much adored musical of all time and which has had a treatment most befitting of satire and the huge comic embrace that only Keddy Sutton, Gillian Hardie and Homotopia could wonderfully provide.
The school sports day,
a yearly ritual in which evolved
over the years from spoons and eggs,
hard boiled, once glued, often dropped
on the dangerous gravel or if fortunate perhaps
dog littered grass,
sometimes obliterated
and tears and tantrums flowing soon after
as someone never finished the course, to
complex games
of hierarchical displays of ever growing
hormone driven adulthood.
If wet, held indoors
or simply delayed a day or two,
to frustrated parents dismay
and then the crushing pain of unprepared running,
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: David Suchet, Hugh Fraser, Helen Baxendale, Anne Reid, Matthew McNulty, Shaun Dingwall, Philip Glenister, Anna Madeley, Claire Keelen, John Standing, Alice Orr-Ewing, Aiden McArdle, Adam Englander, Gregory Cox.
The last post is played, Poirot has died. Not before though the Belgian solves his last murder before it has even happened as the pace of this special, Curtain: Poirot’s Final Case goes deeper and darker than has been alluded to before, with the greatest of exceptions to the Poirot story of them all, Murder On The Orient Express.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Fun On Earth has been years in the making so many years in fact, that if it was a musician from almost any other band who had forged a respectable solo career, the fans might have drifted on and found a new hero to relish in. This though is Roger Taylor, a man who has been at the heart of British Rock for 40 years, a man who can turn up at Foo Fighters gig, a group not known for their shortage of drumming talent, and give a blistering display and who also arguably had the more prolonged success away from Queen than the three other members of the iconic group.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
If you look back with fond memories of music from the 1960s, then this is the concert for you. With an average age of 60 plus both on stage and off, fans were treated to an evening of nostalgia, which from start to finish stirred the emotions of those heady days long ago.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
There always seems to be debate on the links between Metal and the art of Progressive Rock. There are many bands that have perfected the lofty ideal that criss-crosses two outwardly disparate genres, the blurring and adding to of the ability to tell a story over the course of an album to the hard edge, the absolute limit of Metal technical adeptness.
Cast: Michael Hugo, Samantha Robinson, Angela Bain, Howard Chadwick, Claire Storey, Paul Barnhill, Alan McMahon, Robert Pickavance, Dyfig Morris, Sophie Hatfield, Hester Arden.
Whilst the overall central theme of The Grand Gesture may be worrying to some and have others wondering how you can have a comedy set around the premise of a man wanting to end his life, it shouldn’t though detract from the very superb way that Northern Broadsides, perhaps one of the keenly anticipated companies that makes its way on regular basis to the Liverpool Playhouse Theatre, took on Nikolai Erdman’s brilliant work The Suicide.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, MyAnna Buring, Neve McIntosh, Leanne Best, Gillian Saker, Charlene McKenna, David Wilmot, Damien Molony, David Dawson, Frank Harper, Robert O’ Mahoney, Alexis Forbes, Amber Rowan, Ciaran O’ Brien.
Ripper Street not only focuses its twitching nose and beady eye at the life of Detective Inspector Reid and the men who he surrounds himself with in the cause of his duty in Whitechapel but also of those who had more to fear than anybody else in the dark days of Queen Victoria’s reign – the women themselves. Become Man looks at the complex relationship between men and women the year after the brutal and senseless murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel and it’s streets.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast Mike Vogel, Rachelle Lefevre, Dean Norris, Natalie Martinez, Britt Robertson, Alexander Koch, Colin Ford, Mackenzie Lintz, Nicholas Strong, Aisha Hands, Jolene Purdy, John Elvis, Samantha Mathis, Leon Rippy, Natalie Zea, Jeff Fahey.
It takes supreme endeavour to take one of Stephen King’s novels or short stories and turn them into something worth either taking a couple of hours out of your day to go to the cinema and seeing someone else’s view of much loved characters or investing several months of your life to and watching a series from start to finish in the hope that what you see will ever match up to the very high expectation of immersing yourself in one of the many books.