CityLife

Calendar Girls

Calendar Girls
Palace Theatre
February 21, 2011

In box office terms, Calendar Girls is, apparently, the most successful play to tour the UK - and this Manchester visit is supposedly part of its very last shuffle around the country.

If it is (and I hear rumours it might not be after all), it’s certainly going out on a high, with packed, ecstatic, audiences and one of the best casts the play has managed to assemble.

From the original ensemble, Lynda Bellingham (Loose Women, Oxo mum, etc) survives, playing the central role of the woman who makes it all happen, and again playing it for all it’s worth.

But there’s also Trudie Goodwin (The Bill); Jennifer Ellison (Brookside); Ruth Madoc (Hi-De-Hi, Little Britain); Bernie Nolan (The Nolans, Brookside, The Bill) and Lisa Riley (Emmerdale) among others.

It’s quite a cast of ladies of a certain age and they and the audience are clearly having a ball.

Based on a true story that you surely must know by now – members of a Yorkshire Women’s Institute become world famous by posing naked for a charity calendar – Warrington lad Tim Firth’s stage adaptation of his own screenplay is one of those yarns that bears repeating because it is packed with interesting and varied characters doing the unexpected against an everyday familiar background.

Ex-and soon-to-return Corrie actor Bruno Langley (Todd Grimshaw) has the job of calendar photographer (and confusingly doubles as a TV ads director), while Joe McGann (The Upper Hand) has the tragic role of John, dying of cancer, whose fate sparks the whole idea of the calendar fund- raising.

Directed by long-time former Manchester Library Theatre director Roger Haines, each and every one of the ladies duly gets her spot-lit cameo party piece and while there’s very little subtlety anywhere on show during the whole evening, there’s no doubt this approach gets the laughs.

Until February 26 (Saturday).

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