top of page
Recent News
Archive
Review: Jack and the Beanstalk at the Liverpool Everyman ****
This year’s Everyman Rock ‘n’ Roll panto comes with a content warning – for silliness, songs, glitter and water guns. And if the physical glitter is mostly confined to Liam Tobin’s extravagant false eyelashes, there’s certainly plenty of silliness, a thumping soundtrack of songs and a traditional seasonal soaking on offer. After a rocky couple of Christmas seasons around the time of Covid, with changes in personnel and storytelling emphasis (it all got a bit too serious and p
Review: The Scouse Christmas Carol at Liverpool Royal Court ****1/2
‘Will Charlie Dicko spin so fast in his grave that a sinkhole opens up?’ the Royal Court ponders in the marketing for its entertainingly larky take on the Victorian scribe’s much-loved, much-told Christmas ghost story. I’m not so sure. Because the ghost of Dickens past like a lark himself. Take the ‘lighthearted and frolicksome’ farce, Mr Nightingale’s Diary, which he penned with Punch editor Mark Lemon and performed on stage at the Philharmonic Hall in 1852 with his chums (i
Review: Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra at Philharmonic Hall *****
Monday is not a usual music-making night at the Phil, but when one of Liverpool’s most famous sons (Sir Simon Rattle) drops in with one of the world’s foremost orchestras (the Bavarian Radio Symphony), it would be rude not to break with convention. And there was certainly a real sense of occasion in the auditorium for this bonus highlight of the 2025/26 season. Rattle, who turned 70 earlier this year, and his latest crack German outfit, are on a whistlestop European autumn to
Review: Liverpool Mozart Orchestra at the Tung Auditorium ****
How do you mark 75 years of music making in Liverpool? How about by inviting the city’s most famous (non-Beatle) musical export to launch your special anniversary? Wishful thinking? Reaching for the stars? It turned out not for the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra whose opening concert of its 75 th  season serendipitously coincided with a rare visit home for its illustrious president Sir Simon Rattle, in town to open a European tour with his own current outfit the Bavarian Radio Sy
Review: Little Women at the Liverpool Playhouse ****
Those Little Women have been on a big journey over the course of 2025 with this sprightly new production of the classic coming-of-age tale crisscrossing the UK. But it’s apt the tour of a story which opens amid the brutal upheaval of the American Civil War should finish here in Liverpool, and in this week too. While it officially ended six months earlier, the American Civil War finally concluded on November 6, 1865, when Captain James Waddell sailed up the Mersey in the CSS S
Review: Top Hat at the Liverpool Empire ****
The Empire is currently celebrating its centenary - and back in the same space in March 1926, Liverpool audiences would have been treated to Mr ‘top hat, white tie and tails’ himself Fred Astaire treading its boards. Astaire appeared with his sister Adele in George Gershwin’s Lady be Good. And it evidently proved to be good, because they returned to Lime Street for another run in early 1927. By the mid-30s, Astaire had gone from big theatre star to even bigger screen star. An
Review: Breaking the Code at the Liverpool Playhouse ****
When playwright Hugh Whitemore wrote Breaking the Code 40 years ago, Alan Turing may have been a huge cheese in the development of computing, but his wasn’t a name commonly known among the general public. Consider how much has changed since then, and indeed from 30 years earlier than that when Turing’s life was snuffed out aged just 41 in desperately sad – and still contested – circumstances. Along with Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing, The Enigma and Whitemore’s play, there h
Review: Shostakovich Symphony No.7 at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall ****1/2
‘Keep calm and carry on’ seems to have been the order of the day at the Philharmonic Hall over the weekend. And indeed, if it hadn’t been for the email that popped into hundreds of inboxes on Saturday afternoon mentioning a ‘slight’ change of programme because the Phil’s truck had broken down somewhere between Bristol and Liverpool, no one would have been any the wiser. The main casualty of this unexpected occurrence was Victoria Borisova-Ollas. The poor Swedish composer must
Review: Lost Atoms at the Liverpool Playhouse ****
When a trio of Swansea university students formed a theatre company there in the mid-90s, little could they have imagined that they themselves would one day be studied in turn. But 30 years on, Frantic Assembly is on not one but several curricula, as the huge number of young people in the audience at the Liverpool Playhouse on opening night revealed. The company has a long association with Liverpool. One of its earliest successes was Wirral playwright Michael Wynne’s Sell Out
Review: The Tempest at Shakespeare North Playhouse ****
Earlier this year Shakespeare North Playhouse delivered a gleefully irreverent stag and hen Love’s Labour’s Lost, and before that was a...
bottom of page