Liverpool Sound and Vision rating * * * * *
Photograph by Marc Brenner, used with kind permission by Everyman Theatre.
Cast: Liam Tobin, Kacey Ainsworth, Emma Dears, Paul Duckworth, Keziah Joseph, Dean Nolan, Bryan Parry, Shiv Rabheru, Mark Rice-Oxley.
Musicians: Tarek Merchant, Daisy Evans, Samantha Norman, Alex Smith.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Emma Dears, Helen Sheals.
Music: Greg Palmer.
There are icons and then there are those who, thanks to maybe one performance, one shining brilliant moment captured on film or record, will forever be immortalised, their images seared into the minds of the public, even those who were not born when they tragically passed away, their attitude remaining an engraved line on the monument on how stars are born and their names becoming the epitaph of the age. It is both a warning to how lives can be snatched away and never be truly our own, and it can be the huge embrace of knowing how much a human being can be loved.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Maria Lovelady, Eithne Browne, Christopher Jordan, Emma Dears, Jake Abraham, Tom Cawte, Roy Carruthers, Phil Hearne.
The taste of 1930s Britain so elegantly captured in Helen Forrester’s Twopence To Cross The Mersey is arguably more palpable, more authentic than any text book that might go on at length to describe the after effects of the Great Depression on those caught in its wake and the sacrifice many individuals had to face just to survive; it is genuine, touching, brutal and one that still pervades the modern era and the way its shapes politics today.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Jake Abraham, Eithne Browne, Roy Carruthers, Daniel Davies, Emma Dears, Brian Dodd, Christopher Jordan, Maria Lovelady.
There is a horrible sense of deja vu as one looks around closely in hidden doors and hears the sounds of families at war with themselves that the period known as the Great Depression, the 1930s stumbling block to world peace has been making itself at home for the last few years and nobody has truly noticed. Thankfully the true depths that the world groped around in the dark with during that time has not materialised again but only perhaps good fortune, rather than political reckoning has saved the type of scenes witnessed by the writer Helen Forrester as she grew up impoverished in a city that was fighting for grim survival and without even Twopence To Cross The Mersey.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
It is quite something to see a master story teller, a Queen of Crime, on stage being interviewed by arguably a man whose passion for Liverpool, his appetite for culture and ability to hold an audience’s attention singles him out as one of the finest in the city.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Lucy Williamson, Emma Dears.
Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, perhaps two of the biggest names in American show business ever and surely impossible to ever replicate on stage what they have each achieved and the adoration in which they are still held to this day. Whilst Judy Garland’s life was heartbreakingly cut short due to near obscene levels of pressure, Ms Minnelli has been a born survivor despite the huge ruby slippers she had to fill and yet in Judy & Liza it was if the two women had come back together just one more time.