Calendar Girls
All- star show returns to the North West
The Lowry, Mon 16 – Sat 21 March 2008
Press night: Mon 16 March, 7.30pm
Due to public demand, the box office hit Calendar Girls returns to The Lowry starring Lynda Bellingham, Patricia Hodge, Sian Phillips, Gaynor Faye, Brigit Forsyth, Julia Hills and Elaine C Smith.
A group of extraordinary women, members of a very ordinary Yorkshire WI, persuade one another to pose for a charity calendar with a difference! Puzzling their husbands, mortifying their children and riding the wrath of an outraged WI, they inadvertently spark a global phenomenon. As interest in the calendar snowballs, the ladies find themselves revealing more than they’d ever planned.
Lynda Bellingham explained: "It celebrates the good side of human nature. People tell us that they have laughed and they have cried in equal measure. In the play there is that wonderful juxtaposition between the tragedy of John's death and the laughter which is produced by the womens' attempts to do something to mark it. The biggest laughs in the show come as a release from the tension the audience feels. To get the audience to both laugh and cry is a real pleasure."
Tim Firth has adapted the screenplay of his smash hit Mirimax film for the stage. The film was released in 2003 and was an instant hit at the box office, becoming the number one grossing film in the UK on its release.
Patricia Hodge commented: "Nudity may be the word on everybody's lips but whenever we come out of the stage door and chat to the public, nobody mentions it. That scene works so well because it's all about what you don't see. When we ran it for the first time, it was a closed set and we were in a school gymnasium. You'd have thought that actors of all people would have been more in tune with their own bodies but we were all in terrific fits of giggles and it all got very silly."
Calendar Girls is directed by Olivier Award winner Hamish McColl. Hamish is probably best known as half of the double act The right size, who from 1988 created a unique style of comic theatre culminating in the smash hit The Play What I Wrote which won the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment. Other credits include Hysterium in Edward Hall’s production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the National Theatre.
Posted on Thursday, 26 February 2009 under Press Theatre Press