THEGAYUK

Tag: UK

  • TOP LIST: Ten of The Top Cross-Gender Performances in Theatre

    During the earliest conception of theatre in English history, there were specific laws that restricted women from having any involvement within performances and acting onstage in any way.

    Englishmen found it amusing that in other countries, such as continental Europe, women were allowed on stage. As the centuries have rolled out and Shakespearean traditions continue to reign stage direction, the 21st century has seen gender role switching become something of a trend within theatre across the world. Some of the most iconic roles in history, such as Hamlet, being played by the opposite gender has a become popular and modern tendency used by directors to creatively adapt the story in a way that is unconventional and engaging. We look at the 10 top plays where switching gender roles have played a role in the success of a play:

    1. The Importance of Being Earnest (2015)

    David Suchet plays the role of the formidable Lady Bracknell in the 2015 version of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ at the London Vaudeville Theatre.2. The Merchant of Venice (2015)

    Rachel Pickup played Portia, who dresses up as a boy to enjoy the freedom that comes without having to be a woman, in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ earlier this year at The Globe, London.

    3. Hamlet (2014)

    Maxine Peake played the Danish Prince in ‘Hamlet’ at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in 2014, although the leading roles of Prospero and Macbeth each went to males.
    4. Henry IV (2014)

    Harriet Walter plays the lead role of ‘Henry IV’ in Phyllida Lloyds recreation at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in 2014.

    5. Twelfth Night (2012)

    Mark Rylance’s performance as a ‘stylised’ Olivia in Tim Carroll’s Shakespeare Globe adaptation of ‘Twelfth Night’ was critically acclaimed back in 2012 at London’s Apollo.

    6. The War of The Roses (2009)

    Cate Blanchett played Richard II in Benedict Andrews production of ‘The War Of Roses’ in Sydney, 2009.7. Taming Of The Shrew (2003)

    Janet McTeer played the macho Pertruchio in the all-female casting of ‘Taming Of The Shrew’ back in 2003.
    8. The Tempest (2000)

    Vanessa Redgrave gave a memorable performance as Prospero in ‘The Tempest’ back in 2000 at the Globe, London.
    9. Richard II (1995)

    Irish actress Fiona Shaw played Richard II in Deborah Warner’s production at the National Theatre, London, in 1995.
    10. Peter Pan (1954)

    Mary Martin played Peter in the original theatrical production of ‘Peter Pan’ in 1954. Which later saw Cathy Rigby and Sandy Duncan amongst others take the role.

    THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST starring David Suchet will be screened live by satellite from London’s Vaudeville Theatre to 400 cinemas across the UK & Ireland on Thursday 8th October at 7.15pmhttp://importanceofearnest.com/cinema

  • All Set For The Inaugural Icon Awards In Scotland As Conchita Flies In

    The Scottish LGBTI community is set for the inaugural Icon Awards, set to hit Glasgow this October 9th. The awards aim to reward and celebrate the LGBTI community of Scotland with what’s being penned as the night of the year in the Scottish LGBTI calendar.

    Scotland is leading the way in the race for equality and inclusion, with the passing of the gay marriage bill, and the recent accolade of being the most progressive country in Europe, but there is still a “long way to go” says event manager and organiser Michael Macfarlane.
    He added,

    “The Icon Awards will be an inclusive event, inviting people from all over Scotland to come together and celebrate diversity. The awards will go to individuals, businesses and organisations that are going the extra mile, and are working towards equality for all.”

    Eighteen categories span the full spectrum of the LGBTI community and their achievements.

    Music legend Horse MacDonald also commented saying; “It is so important for the LGBTI community to identify with and have role models, when I was growing up there were so few people to look up to and aspire to. It’s the role models of today’s society who are challenged with helping people accept who they are, and in turn help the endless battle towards full equality for the LGBTI community across Scotland and the world” Horse added,

    “A ceremony like this is long overdue in Scotland, and will help create new role models, and highlight areas that still have a long way to go like sport, as well as creating an inclusive event for all to come and enjoy”.

    One Scottish sporting star who believes in the cause is former Glasgow 2014 team Scotland swimmer, and British LGBT sporting personality of the year finalist Martin Cremin.

    Born in Dunblane, Martin was at the forefront of Scottish sport, now living in London he is still a firm supporter of the LGBTI sporting scene.

    Conchita Wurst and Michelle Visage will be in attendance for the very first awards.

  • Gay Escort Jailed For Blackmailing Married Man

    A gay escort has been jailed for the blackmailing of a married businessman and sending his wife a picture of him wearing women’s underwear.

    John Walker, 29 has been sentenced to 32 months in jail after he was found guilty of blackmailing a businessman. The Leeds Crown Court heard that Walker had managed to extort nearly £5000 from the man.

    According to the Times Walker threaten to expose the unnamed 49-year-old victim with pictures of him wearing women’s underwear, watching gay porn and taking drugs during a scheduled meeting in Feb this year after the pair met on a gay escorting website and had agreed on a £1800 fee.

    David Lampitt, the prosecutor said that during a conversation between the two, Walker told the victim

    “that he was cheating on his wife and thought it was disgusting. He warned the complainant that he should be more careful with his phone and wallet because people could extort money from him.”

    The day after their meet the victim was sent a text message in which he threatened to ring the man’s wife.

    The victim sent his blackmailer £3000 but the blackmailing didn’t stop. In March Walker sent a video text of his victim wearing women’s underwear to the man’s wife.

    It was then that the victim admitted what he had done to his wife and reported the incident to the police.

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Showstoppers show themselves up in the West End

    Long form improv is the high-wire act of this performing spectacle in this impromptu musical theatre delight.

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  • THEATRE REVIEW: Pam Ann Queen Of The Skies, Leicester Square Theatre

    She’s still got it. Forty-Six she reminds us, and still has lots of wear left in those knees. ★★★★

    And as those noisy punters she had removed from the front row will attest, as feisty as ever. Pam Ann is the unchallenged Queen of the skies and looking around at the packed Leicester Square theatre – queen of the gays as well – with every c*ck joke, every rim job mention provoking whoops of excitement that explode across the small auditorium.

    It’s not hard to understand why the gays have taken Pam under their collective wing for nearly 20 years, in an interview with this very magazine in 2013 she said about the gay community,

    “They didn’t create Pam Ann; they created my whole fking life and my existence. That’s why I have not got married. I have not had kids. I am a fking gay man, 99 per cent of my friends are gay so they can take responsibility for everything. My vocabulary is gay, I speak gay, everything is gay. I f**k like a gay so you know, I say they created my whole existence and Pam Ann.”

    There’s something different though with Pam Ann, perhaps a little more self-aware than her usual, it feels a little Pam Ann 2.0. In this show there’s a lot less “air” jokes and hardly any of her beloved characters, such as Lily, Valerie and Helga. The first part gives way to a full on stand up routine and while much is in the character, Caroline Reid (Pam Ann’s creator and body) is it seems, breaking and aching to get out.

    Don’t get me wrong; she still gets in the ‘ass-like-a-hippo’s-yawn’ gag (it was at 3 minutes and 42 seconds, but who’s counting) and she still flies in the headwind of the PC brigade, using race, religion, heterosexuals and class as her bread and butter material, much to the applause of the crowd.

    While some media outlets will call her shtick out-dated and a product of days past, our community needs levity and moment to stop eating itself from the inside and listen to some of the pearls that fall from Reid’s mouth – and she knows that. With a knowing eye she momentarily tips her hat off to one particuarly hotly contested word – to the delight of the audience.

    But what if Pam wasn’t Pam anymore? Instead we have Caroline… I’m excited about the prospect; does she need to be dressed up in the uniform to still be hailed high as one of the campest comic creations by the gay community? The question is will we let her flamboyant, coked up stewardess character go? Will we let Reid fly, shed the wingtips and become a fully-fledged real person rather than the institution she’s become?

    Pam Ann Queen of The Skies is on at the Leicester Square Theatre until November 30th.

     

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Roaring Trade – bankers misbehaving in a play with very little bark

    The strange world of bond trading and the lives of the traders who inhabit it is explored in the new play “Roaring Trade.” ★★

    There are four desks in an office in Canary Wharf where four unique personalities ply their trade day in and day out. Their goal, of course, is to make money. But not all of them do. Fortunes are made, and lost, in a single second. It’s a very stressful job, one that has direct effects on their families.
    ‘Roaring Trade’ is set on a bond trading floor of a fictional investment bank called ‘McSorleys.’ It introduces us to the four people who live and breathe their jobs. We’ve got beautiful blonde Jess (Lesley Harcourt), confident but not cocky. She’s got more balls than some of the men she works with, including Donny (Nick Moran), who’s putty in her hands, and is the cocky one. Then there’s PJ (Michael McKell), burnt out yet still slaves away at his job to appease his keeping up appearances wife Sandy (Melanie Gutteridge). Spoon (Timothy George) arrives as a new team member, very young, getting the job because his father is a fat cat in the City.
    For these four, it’s all about the money, and the bonus that validates their performances. It’s what drives them to succeed, at any cost, and whether that puts another team member at risk, so be it. When newbie Spoon makes £3.6 million on a trade, he suddenly becomes the golden boy. And when it comes to bonus time, Donny is oh so curious as to how much Spoon has received, enough so to attempt to take a peak at Spoon’s bonus letter. But when PJ receives less than what he’s expecting (a luxury trip to Barbados is cancelled for a trip to Brussels), this means his wife Sandy will not get her new kitchen, and their seven bedroom house will have to be put up for sale. Sandy says she’s worried that they will be the target of gossip if they sell their house, though PJ says that she likes to be the center of good gossip when the money is coming in and she is spending.
    Meanwhile, Donny instills his work ethic on to his son Sean (William Nye), teaching him how to make money using a sachet of ketchup as an example. He tells Sean that in the bond world, money can be made by selling something one doesn’t own, and making money off of it. It’s an example the son takes to heart.
    But things get very tense on the trading floor when Donny is down £8.6 million on a trade, and it gets even more tense when PJ is offered a head trading role at fictional investment bank Shads, and he wants to take the rest of the team with him. But when one trade goes in a different direction than expected because of internet chat room gossip, it’s anyone’s guess whose going to be in the money and whose going to be out of the money. And it’s not who you would expect.
    ‘Roaring Trade’ takes the ‘bankers are wankers’ phrase and runs with it. Donny, the veteran, seems to just care about making money. Jess appears heartless but always in control, while Spoon the newbie is so green that he will take risks just to get ahead. We get a different message from PJ – that not all bankers are bad. While the acting is not bad (George is superb as the new kid on the block) and Harcourt nails it as the tough-as-nails Jess, Mckell’s acting is a bit over the top, and the character behaviour not quite believable. Originally written for the stage in 2009 and quickly updated to reflect today’s news (a line in the show is “bonds are dropping like VW”), ‘Roaring Trade’ has more of a yelp than a roar. And while our real banks have taken risks in the past and are paying heavily for it now, as Donny says in the play – ‘There’s risk in everything that matters.’
    ‘Roaring Trade’ is playing until 24 October 2015 at The Park Theatre in Finsbury Park. To buy tickets, click here

  • THEATRE REVIEW | 5 Guys Chillin At The Kings Head Theatre

    5 Guys Chillin’ is a verbatim drama adapted from over 50 hours of anonymous interviews about the world of chem-sex on the gay scene. ★★

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  • REVIEW: Domyos Expander

    Lightweight weight training kit on the go. Domyos expander – fit for purpose?

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  • Ray The Gay Builder Gets Married

    Gaydio-celebrity, eastender, ex-boxer, and pink helmet-donner Ray Bulloch the self-proclaimed first openly gay builder has just tied the rainbow-knot.

    Ray sprinkled his fairy dust all over the press last year when his fifteen-year-old building company came screwing, hammering and drilling its way out the closet, pink transit van in tow.
    We’ve all heard: “Why have a gay friendly builder, when you can have a friendly gay builder” – that’s our Ray.
    Bulloch met his long term partner Micky (Michael Watson), 52 who works in the theatre, fifteen years ago on an AOL chat room. Their first date was a trip to London’s Victoria to see Bombay Dreams at the Apollo – Ray said, “we are like chalk and cheese, but it was love at first sight”.
    Ray and Micky decided to walk down the Chelsea Town Hall aisle on Sunday 27th September at 1pm – not only because they love each other, but they wanted to give one another peace-of-mind if anything happened in the future. Bulloch said, “Micky doesn’t have a big family, and now he will”.
    Ray decided to lose the pink tool belt, helmet and drill and opted for matching grey, with subdued light grey over check, Hugo Boss whistle-and-flutes – with of course, matching powder pink shirts and cerise pink paisley ties.
    The wedding reception was held at Bluebird on the Kings Road, a handful of confetti throw away from the wedding venue. Bulloch said “I just want our 50 guest to celebrate our wonderful day”.
    The only sad thing about the day is that Reggie (a shiatsu), Scooby (half staffie half english bull terrier), Ronnie (tabby cat), Louise (a one-eyed cat) and Elvis (a blasphemous parrot) couldn’t attend – they all live with the newlyweds and are a big part of their family.

    No doubt the five family members that weren’t allowed at the wedding, were treated to a piece of the Choccywoccydoodah wedding cake when Ray carried Micky over the threshold.

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs)

    ★★★★ – packed with explosive surprises. (more…)

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Kiss Me, Kate – Leeds Grand Theatre and National Tour

    As a sucker for a classic musical, I was very curious to see what Opera North would make of the Cole Porter classic. ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ is a typical tale of mistaken identity, a will they/wont they love story, a bit of swindling and a bunch of likeable characters all interwoven with an appealing collection of songs. ★★★★★

    Porter’s tale stages a play within a play, telling the story of Fred Graham, an actor and director who casts his ex-wife as his co-star; and finds himself in hot water when one of his other leading men signs off a gambling debt in his name. He tries desperately to keep his musical production of The Taming Of The Shrew on track, as a couple of inept gangsters show up to collect the debt and Grahams relationship with his ex-wife sways between love and hate. But as everything falls apart and the backstage bickering starts to mirror the story on stage, Graham does everything he can in ensuring that the show must go on.
    The songs from Kiss Me, Kate are some of Porter’s most sterling work, with an overarching jazzy vibe which made the musical numbers delightfully catchy. “Why Can’t You Behave”; “Tom, Dick or Harry” and “Too Darn Hot” were all proper toe tappers, and Tiffany Graves multiple reprises of “Always True To You In My Fashion” were simply glorious.
    Opera North have gathered a great company for this show, which draws from a variety of disciplines to produce a collective cast of people who not only specialise, but excel in their field. The classically trained opera singers blended absolutely seamlessly with the musical theatre actors and the dancers. The collective sound and sheer power of the ensemble was stunning. The cast combined to make the production one where each individual element was performed by those with pure strength in their performances and was all the better for it. Quirijn De Lang is vocally strong and charismatic as Graham, whilst Jeni Bern proves an equally impressive sparring partner, and Tiffany Graves and Ashley Day both playfully bounce off each other quite happily.
    But on top of that, the production was top notch, with a beautifully designed set, which was detailed and ingeniously versatile; showing what was happening on stage, in the wings and backstage on the twirl of a backdrop. The costumes were sumptuous, being full of sharp suits and flapper dresses behind the scenes; and lavish, detailed period costumes on stage. Jo Davis directs the show with a flair which mirrors the quality of the presentation and the whole thing oozes class. Add into that a cracking, brass filled performance from the orchestra, conducted by David Charles Abell, and you have an outstanding production which wouldn’t be out of place on any West End stage.

    The show looks and sounds superb and there are not many productions that have such a great show stopping numbers at the start of each act. The script glistens with wit and charm which is reflected in the performances and the whole thing is professionally polished to within an inch of its life. Don’t be put off by thinking this is traditional opera. It’s not. ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ is musical theatre as it should be performed.

    Kiss Me, Kate is part of Opera North’s Autumn programme, which also includes The Barber Of Sevilleand Jenufa. These shows can be seen on various dates at Leeds Grand Theatre until 31st October 2015, before visiting The Theatre Royal in Newcastle (3 – 7 November 2015), The Lowry, Salford Keys, Manchester (10th – 14th November 2015) and Nottingham Theatre Royal (17th – 21st November 2015). For tickets and further details, visit www.operanorth.co.uk

    by Paul Szabo | @IAmScubamonkey