Manchester is about to start a summer filled not only with sun it seems, but with a vibrant theatre scene.
Some of the best shows are coming straight from award-winning residencies on Broadway and the West End, landing right in our laps at The Palace Theatre. Just as rumours for a third movie in the series swirl, Legally Blonde The Musical will be hair-flipping into town to tell the story of Elle Woods through song. The latest Dreamworks musical celebrating family-favourite Madagascar will also be leaping to the stage for a school holiday sensation.
Those looking for a showcase of the best local storytelling on offer will also not be disappointed. Look no further than the Royal Exchange Theatre, where Maxine Peake will be returning both in her role as an actress and director in two productions across June and July.
Take a look at our theatre diary and get booking your tickets now...
Manchester Opera House
Awful Auntie by David Walliams
Weds 20 - Sun 24th June
When Stella sets off to visit London with her parents, Lord and Lady Saxby, she has no idea her life is in danger! Waking up three months later, only her Aunt Alberta can tell Stella what has happened. But not everything Alberta tells her turns out to be true and Stella quickly discovers she’s in for the fight of her life against her very own awful Auntie!
The Play That Goes Wrong
Mon 25 - Sat 30th June
Fawlty Towers meets Noises Off in this multi award-winning smash hit comedy, now playing on Broadway and enjoying its 4th year in the West End. The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society are putting on a 1920s murder mystery, but as the title suggests, everything that can go wrong… does! As the accident prone thesps battle on against all the odds to reach their final curtain call, hilarious results ensue!
Sherlock Holmes - The Final Curtain
Mon 23 - Sat 28th July
Could this be the final curtain for the world’s greatest detective? Sherlock Holmes lives in retirement on the South Coast. He keeps bees, occasionally casts his fly fishing rod, even plays his Stradivarius when the rheumatism allows.
All too aware that he’s older and slower, he’s concerned that he might have lost his touch, paranoid that he is an easy target for his enemies. There have been so many over the years. He never truly believed Moriarty - his arch nemesis - died at the Reichenbach Falls.
So when Mary Watson (wife of his former associate Dr John Watson) tracks him down, telling him she has seen her long-dead son, James, through the window of 221B Baker Street, apparently alive and well, Holmes is determined to solve the mystery and confront his own demons at the same time.
Manchester Palace Theatre
Legally Blonde
Mon 25 - Sat 30th June
Starring Rita Simons as Paulette Bonafonte, Lucie Jones as Elle Woods and Bill Ward as Professor Callahan.
The smash hit Broadway and West End Musical based on the best loved movie follows beautiful and popular sorority sister Elle Woods who loves to be pampered and is passionate about pink. When she is dumped by her boyfriend Warner Huntington III for a more serious girlfriend she puts down the credit cards and picks up the books. Packing up her trusty pooch, Bruiser, she bags herself a place at the prestigious Harvard Law School to try and win him back. With the support of her new friends she learns that you can be both smart and fashionable.
Mamma Mia
Tues 3 - Sat 14th July
Set on a Greek island paradise, a story of love, friendship and identity is cleverly told through the timeless songs of ABBA. Sophie’s quest to discover the father she’s never known brings her mother face to face with three men from her distant romantic past on the eve of a wedding they’ll never forget.
FAME
Fri 20 - Sat 28th July
The definitive 30th-anniversary tour of Fame The Musical starring Keith Jack (Any Dream Will Do, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat), Mica Paris (Love Me Tender, Chicago, Mama I Want To Sing) and Jorgie Porter (Hollyoaks, Dancing On Ice). Based on the 1980 phenomenal pop culture film, Fame The Musical is the international smash hit sensation following the lives of students at New York’s High School For The Performing Arts as they navigate their way through the highs and lows, the romances and the heartbreaks and the ultimate elation of life. This bittersweet but uplifting triumph of a show explores the issues that confront many young people today: prejudice, identity, pride, literacy, sexuality, substance abuse and perseverance.
The Great Gatsby Murder Mystery
Sat 4 - Sat 11th July
‘The Great British Gatsby’ brings to life some of the most notorious and eccentric characters of 1920s England. Attention-seeking, glamorous and rebellious, you are the original party animals – and one of you is dead.
Madagascar The Musical
Tue 14 - Sat 18 August
Join Alex (X-Factor 2016 winner Matt Terry), Marty, Melman and Gloria as they bound out of the zoo and onto the stage in Madagascar The Musical.
This smash hit musical features all of your favourite crack-a-lackin’ friends as they escape from their home in New York’s Central Park Zoo and find themselves on an unexpected journey to the madcap world of King Julien’s Madagascar.
This brand new musical from Dreamworks (Shrek The Musical) will leave audiences with no choice but to ‘move it, move it’!
Royal Exchange Manchester
Queens of the Coal Age
28 June - 28 July
This powerful play full of Northern wit is Associate Artist Maxine Peake’s first play for the Royal Exchange following the critically acclaimed, Beryl. Queens of the Coal Age is the true story of four women taking a stand in the face of a changing world. Anne, Elaine, Dot and Lesley. Four ordinary women, facing the closure of their community. It’s 1993 and the Parkside Colliery pit may be winding down, but they’re not giving up. Their bras stuffed with contraband, they take a tour of the pit and refuse to come up. Settling into the depths of the mine, making tissue roses and walking imaginary dogs, they face bribery and threats. But as they dig in, those up top start to realise these ladies are not for turning.
The Lowry Theatre Salford
War Horse
Until June 30
At the outbreak of World War One, Joey, young Albert’s beloved horse, is sold to the Cavalry and shipped to France. He’s soon caught up in enemy fire, and fate takes him on an extraordinary journey, serving on both sides before finding himself alone in no man’s land. Albert, who remained on his parents’ Devon farm, cannot forget Joey. Though still not old enough to enlist he embarks on a treacherous mission to find him and bring him home.
Based on the beloved novel by Michael Morpurgo, this powerfully moving and imaginative drama, filled with stirring music and songs, is a show of phenomenal inventiveness. At its heart are astonishing life-sized horses by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, who bring breathing, galloping, charging horses to thrilling life on stage.
The Man on the Moor
Saturday 16th June
On 12 December 2015, an elderly looking gentleman was found dead on Saddleworth Moor. He was carrying no form of identification. Train tickets in his pockets showed he’d travelled 200 miles, apparently just to die. Despite a national campaign he remained unidentified.
As the police went public with the man's image, 40 different people reached out to claim 'the man on the moor' as their missing husband, father or brother. These people are 'the left behind'. Those who pick up the pieces when someone they love leaves and simply never comes home again. Written and performed by Max Dickins, this powerful drama looks at how people come to disappear and the impact on those they leave behind.
The Exploded Circus
Sat 16 - Sun 17th June
Step into the moment where an explosion has been frozen in time, the remnants of a big top caught mid-air – with everything from circus ring, sequins and fairground horses suspended above ground.
Featuring a breath-taking mix of acrobatics, surprising aerial feats, and masterful juggling, The Exploded Circus weaves a story told without words, where six female performers have to come together to seek order in the chaos and create a new normal. With striking imagery and subtle humour, the show explores themes around change, hope and belonging.
Mimbre is a female-led contemporary circus company. They use their unique blend of physicality and narrative to tell intimate stories about human connections.
Year of Wonders: 1666 Plague: Heroine and Healer or Wanton and Witch?
June 21 - June 23 2018
When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.
Can love, humanity and hope triumph against desolation, despair and superstition?
Feed
Thurs 28 - Fri 29th June
Welcome to the stimulating world of FEED, where emotions are the currency, and your greatest loves, fantasies and beliefs will be shared...for a price.
Last Resort
Saturday 30th June
Last Resort is an alternative future for Guantanamo Bay. The waterboarding has stopped, the noise has been turned down and the military base has been reclaimed as a holiday destination. You, the audience, are our holidaymakers. You will sit in a deckchair, you will get a rum cocktail on arrival and you will feel the sand between your toes. We will be your tour guides. Join 2Magpies Theatre as they take you through the tropical haze on a unique multi-sensory package holiday. This is an extraordinary rendition and it is all-inclusive.
Last Resort is a menacing fiction, made entirely of unimaginable fact. This immersive show was developed through a research process bringing together artists, academics and human rights organisations including Reprieve.
The Crucible
Mon 2 July-Wed 4th July
Arthur Miller's extraordinary tale as told by ICAT Manchester's graduating students.
Notflix
Thursday 5th July
Netflix combines the taste profiles of 98 million users to create a perfectly ideal viewing experience. Notflix combines the taste profiles of a room full of theatre go-ers to create a brilliantly hilarious and completely improvised viewing experience – a full musical. The all female cast of ‘Notflix’ (otherwise known as ‘Waiting For The Call Improv’) use audience suggestions of recently watched films to create a brand new, fully improvised, one-night-only musical inspired by one audience member’s idea and explanation. Every show is different but what remains is the same joy-filled, high camp, musical celebration of everything you wish a movie could be.Because everything is better as a musical!
Featured in Sunday Times, Marie Claire and Elle Magazines. Funny Women and Musical Comedy Awards nominees.
The Last Ship
Tues 3 - Sat 7th July
The Last Ship, which was initially inspired by Sting’s 1991 album The Soul Cages and his own childhood experiences, tells the story of a community amid the demise of the shipbuilding industry in Tyne and Wear, with the closure of the Swan Hunter shipyard. When a sailor named Gideon Fletcher returns home after seventeen years at sea, tensions between past and future flare in both his family and his town.
The local shipyard, around which the community has always revolved, is closing and no-one knows what will come next, only that a half-built ship towers over the terraces.
With the engine fired and pistons in motion, picket lines are drawn as foreman Jackie and his wife Peggy fight to hold their community together in the face of the gathering storm.
The ensemble cast is lead by Coronation Street, West End and Broadway star Richard Fleeshman as Gideon; Charlie Hardwick, best known for her role as Val Pollard in Emmerdale, as Peggy; Joe McGann (Elf The Musical and The Upper Hand) as Jackie with Frances McNamee, who recently appeared in Big Fish in the West End as Meg.
This personal, political and passionate new musical from multiple Grammy Award winner Sting, is an epic account of a family, a community and a great act of defiance.
Agatha Christie’s Love From A Stranger
Tues 10 - Sat 14 July
“Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody” - Agatha Christie.
A whirlwind romance with a handsome and charming stranger sweeps Cecily Harrington off her feet. Little does she know the ghastly truth about her new beau…
Electric with suspense and with a biting twist in its tail, this edge-of-your-seat, rarely seen thriller by the UK’s greatest crime writer is reimagined in a brand new production by Lucy Bailey (Gaslight, Dial M for Murder).
