Adapting

Our tour of Girl From The North Country rattles along, with performances in Bristol from tomorrow. We also squeeze in visits to Birmingham, Belfast, Aberdeen and Norwich into the shortest month of the year. We’re not hanging about, that’s for sure!

The show has just had a rather intriguing visit to Chichester. The design of its Festival Theatre does not include a fly tower or a proscenium arch, meaning that fundamental parts of our show’s design had to be adapted especially for the venue. A lot of hard work at the beginning of the week to implement changes really paid off, as we presented a “thrust stage” version of the piece, with audience on three sides. The show worked brilliantly in this setting, with every performance (almost at capacity every single night) receiving standing ovations. We left Chichester a very happy company!

We also played Liverpool and Sheffield during January. Audiences in the north have been equally positive, with an added bonus that colleagues and students from my previous place of work - Edge Hill University - were able to pop along to watch. I was also able to visit them one afternoon while in Liverpool to see how the third year students (who I have followed right through from their first year) were getting on with rehearsals for their big production, the world premiere of a new musical Pop Art.

But before all of this restarted, and after my visit to Tokyo, I was able to squash in a weekend visit to Stuttgart, Germany, where my sister is currently performing in Palazzo. Her daughter and husband are with her as well, and I was able to time my visit at the same time as my parents were visiting, allowing our whole immediate family to be together having missed the opportunity over Christmas.

There are only seven venues left to visit on this tour. None of us are really ready to say goodbye to this show yet, which may well be a blessing in disguise, but there is a real family feel on this show. I feel very lucky to still be having such an amazing time on this production. I am however starting to plan how the rest of 2023 pans out… watch this space!