Village WI ladies take it all off in Calendar Girls
Over a three-night run, the company tackled the funny but poignant tale of WI member Annie, who has lost her husband John to leukaemia.
At the suggestion of Annie's irreverent best friend Chris, the WI ladies agree to pose for a nude calendar to fund a new settee for the local hospital's waiting room.
Ruth (Mary Anne Gleeson) with Elaine (Chloe Hughes) (Image: Supplied) But when news gets out about the 'alternative' calendar, and the world's media descends upon the sleepy Yorkshire Dales, even the most solid of friendships get tested to their limits…
Based on a true story, this heartwarming production is a remarkable testament to courage, compassion and creativity – values the ladies of BAMADS showcased in abundance!
In the lead role of Chris, BAMADS veteran Leigh Nash has the experience needed to carry such a nuanced performance.
Marie (Julie Lord) with Chris (Leigh Nash) (Image: Supplied) With her mantra of "nude not naked", it is totally believable that Nash convinces everyone to disrobe – including the most reluctant of models, Ruth, played by the effervescent Mary Anne Gleeson.
Hannah Smith breaks hearts as devastated widow Annie.
Smith's grief feels palpable, but she also communicates Annie's steely determination to act in her late husband's best interests.
Cora (Amy Gladwin) with Jessie (Pauline Carr) and Ruth (Mary Anne Gleeson) (Image: Supplied) Due to unforeseen circumstances, BAMADS Chairperson Bianca Tranter stepped in to play free-spirited musician Cora on the opening night – nailing the role with just a few weeks' preparation.
(For all remaining performances, Amy Gladwin played Cora.)
Julie Ratcliffe is a suitably sexy Celia, who needs little encouragement to get her kit off!
But full marks go to BAMADS newcomer Pauline Carr who, at 67, jumped into amateur dramatics at the deep end – going topless in her first ever show!
Annie (Hannah Smith) with Celia (Julie Ratcliffe) and Jessie (Pauline Carr) (Image: Supplied) In such a female-centric play, it is even more remarkable that Bryan Lynch is so impactful whenever he is on stage – giving us a lovable and relatable John that you cry real tears for.
Lynch may only appear briefly, but his memorable performance is anything but amateur – conveying real depths of emotion with the slightest look or gesture.
Having now made his BAMADS debut, Lynch is definitely 'one to watch'.
Plaudits also go to Julie Lord, who is magnificent as bossy and belligerent WI leader Marie.
Her pronunciation of "Ches-higher" is something to behold, while her one-sided badminton match with Ruth is one of many highlights.
Janette Pye as both Lady Cravenshire and Brenda Hulse, Herb Moore as Rod, Simon Burgess as Lawrence and Arran Abbey as Liam are a talented supporting cast.
But Chloe Hughes as Elaine retains a special spot in this reviewer's heart – being one of the most gifted character actors the company has at its disposal.
Mayor of Warrington Cllr Mo Hussain attended the opening night performance of Calendar Girls (Image: Supplied) Assisted by Jayne Harnick, Rebekah Denton is to be congratulated on her directorial debut – enhancing many scenes with clever visual choices (most notably John's passing/funeral and the arrival of the Calendar Girls' fan mail, fluttering from the ceiling).
A talented actress in her own right, Denton supports each cast member to shine – especially during the nude scenes, which are so tastefully managed, with each 'reveal' feeling like a truly empowering moment.
Izzy Nash's sound and video choices elevate the production further – including the hyper-realistic paparazzi photo flashes and 'breaking news' segments.
Delivering a show like this in 30-plus-degree heat is not for the faint-hearted – especially when wrapped in blankets, dressing gowns and even Santa costumes!
But the cast powered through with their usual mix of professionalism and good humour – taking the laughs right to the curtain with some surprise nude portraits at the very end by Izzy Nash.
Next up for BAMADS is 'The Sound of Music', running from 26 to 29 November.
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Boston Globe
6 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Shining a light into the lives of girlhood friends tackling the art world
Both girls have fathers, although we don't meet Maria's until halfway through the book; Ruth's is a kind of immigrant Bartleby, a man who 'spent decades working and eating and keeping things to himself.' He loves his daughter — his gift of colored pencils sparks her passion for drawing — but is mostly a silent figure. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Wambugu's is a novel primarily about girls and women. The male characters who exist are not particularly interesting on their own — they appear as obstacles or challenges or simply circumstances with which Ruth and Maria must contend. This isn't a failing on the author's part, simply a choice about which stories and people and ideas interest her. Art, after all, cannot look at every single thing on earth; we choose what stories to tell and to hear. Advertisement It turns out that questions about art — who makes it, who consumes it — will become central to Ruth and Maria's lives as they grow up. They graduate from Holy Name and matriculate together at Bard College, both yearning to make art, and to live as artists (not entirely the same thing, as Wambugu slyly points out.) Rooming with her childhood best friend isn't a complete cure for the culture clash Ruth feels on campus. For the first time, she meets people for whom '[b]eing who you were even if your sense of self was in flux or in the process of drastic refashioning, was more important than getting along with others, being liked, being courteous, loving God, or honoring your parents.' Among her other abundant gifts, Wambugu is brilliant at capturing the contradictions of early adulthood — both the specifics of Ruth and Maria's 90s hipster milieu and the universal tension between breaking from one's elders and seeking their support: 'Senior year, everyone talked of dropping out and moving to New York City, though who knew if it was true or just a pose. Everyone wished to seem rebellious, but at their core their wish for order and approval was paramount.' Advertisement 'Lonely Crowds' is both a coming-of-age novel and what the Germans call a Künstlerroman, an account of the artist's growth. Wambugu doesn't dwell overmuch on the details of Ruth's or Maria's work (both do end up in New York pursuing creative lives), but she's adept at sketching the details, and the stakes. In short, blunt sentences, the book devastatingly portrays the realities of money, race, sexuality, ambition — along with the gossipy competitiveness of any insular scene — that both Ruth and Maria confront in New York. Maria is a charismatic, complicated love object throughout the book. Wambugu ably chronicles her struggles. But it's Ruth, through whose eyes we see everything, who shines in all her imperfections. From her childhood carelessness, when 'things seemed to exist only once I'd drawn them,' to a guardedness that stems from a need for clarity ('was it because of my constant drawing that I was missing the details of what I was meant to understand?'), the novel's main character is a real, relatable guide to what it feels like to be a girl, a woman, a friend, a lover, a wife, an artist. As a prose artist, Wambugu plays in different registers, from the brevity of her exposition to the occasional lingering image, such as the Rhode Island winters Ruth witnesses, when '[t]he snow fell and was pissed on and driven over until there was no whiteness left, and when it seemed it couldn't absorb any more human waste, spring came and it melted into the gutters.' And she's wise about childhood, the way we believe in things that turn out to be illusory, or at best, vastly overpromised: 'The Bible, television, the movies, were full of prodigal sons coming home, full of seamless repair, resurrection, outlandish reunions at the last minute, but in life you were lucky if even one person said sorry and meant it.' Advertisement If I have a mild quibble, it's that the book opens with a chapter in Ruth's adulthood before flashing back to that first glimpse of Maria, which is when the reader's heart really starts beating. This is truly minor, and offered mostly as encouragement to keep turning the pages, for as the novel unfolds, it emerges as one of the most emotionally and intellectually rich debuts I can remember reading in this or any year. Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's books section. Lonely Crowds By Stephanie Wambugu Little, Brown, 304 pages, $28 Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
Atlantic
a day ago
- Atlantic
A Lonely Portrait of Lifelong Friendship
The English novelist E. M. Forster believed that people know the characters in the novels they read better than they know one another. In fiction, he argued, a character's true nature and deepest secrets are plainly available, whereas 'mutual secrecy' is 'one of the conditions of life upon this globe.' This idea is strikingly isolating. Can it possibly be true? By the end of Stephanie Wambugu's debut novel, Lonely Crowds, I could see where Forster was coming from. Following the decades-long convolutions of an intense and volatile friendship between two women, Ruth and Maria, Lonely Crowds poses similar questions about the limits of personal relationships. As the girls grow older and their unhealthy childhood patterns repeat in adulthood, their friendship begins to seem more dangerous than idyllic. Perhaps the most prevailing myth about childhood friends is that they know each other completely and love each other best. Wambugu counters such sentimentalism by revealing the many secrets and misunderstandings at the core of Ruth and Maria's friendship. In their world, a lifelong bond is not a comfort but a liability. Lonely Crowds begins in the contemporary present with Ruth, as an adult, seeming very lost at her own birthday party. As the novel's title suggests, a crowd full of people can be a remarkably lonely place. 'That Maria wasn't here at the party was a source of great distress,' Ruth thinks, blowing out the candles. Ruth recalls that when she met Maria years ago, 'I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live. I'd forgotten. Now, I remembered.' Despite her success as an art professor and painter, Ruth feels adrift and bitter. She thinks she sees Maria everywhere. As she falls asleep the night after her party, she recollects her history with Maria, starting from the beginning. Ruth's obsession with Maria sparks from their first encounter, in a uniform shop for the Catholic school where they will soon be classmates. The scene is a small spectacle of shame: Ruth watches while Maria's aunt tries to buy a uniform for Maria on layaway, promising to pay when her disability check comes through. The owner refuses and castigates Maria's aunt in front of a long line of customers, throwing the two of them out of the store. As they leave, Ruth makes eye contact, and Maria 'looked back at me as she crossed the threshold, wide black eyes, perfect. Then she was gone. I felt doomed.' Ruth decides she will befriend the girl at her new school and spends the rest of the summer besotted with the idea. Maria and Ruth meet again on the first day of third grade at Our Lady in Providence, Rhode Island, where the two are the only Black girls in their class. They're the same age, but to Ruth, Maria seems much older and wiser. During their first real conversation at school, Maria brags about her pearl earrings, a gift from a teacher, offering to let Ruth borrow them if she's careful. 'Oh, I'm not careful,' Ruth responds. 'I'm careless.' Her utterly honest response demonstrates Wambugu's knack for capturing the humor of childish intransigence on the page. But the scene also looms large for young Ruth: Maria's earrings represent the mysterious world of adults, one that Ruth is hungry to learn more about. That the gift is inappropriate simply does not register for her. Ruth is an only child, sheltered by her parents, who are Kenyan immigrants to a working-class neighborhood in Pawtucket, outside of Providence. Her mother values hard work and minding one's own business, while her father is 'lonely, mercurial, romantic,' often changing jobs and exacerbating marital tensions. Ruth's upbringing is strict but stable. Maria lives with her aunt, who is severely bipolar, after her mother's death by suicide. The girls' first playdate sets the stage for the uneven dynamic they'll share for the rest of their friendship. After inviting Maria home from school with her, Ruth reminds herself to 'come across as measured, impassive, and confident.' By the end of supper, Maria's politeness and intelligence have charmed Ruth's parents. But the success of the evening is punctured when Maria, as she is leaving, turns around to ask Ruth, 'What's your name again?' Although Ruth never tells the reader how she feels about the question, nor how she responds, the moment feels pivotal, capturing how Ruth's earnestness and longing are so often met with coolness, even rejection. But she soon wins Maria over, and eventually Maria comes to be a part of Ruth's family. Like her biblical namesake, Ruth is loyal and steadfast to her friend, while Maria is independent and creative, often controlling the narrative of their relationship and even determining their future trajectories: Maria is an extrovert, so Ruth must be an introvert. Maria is the type to never settle down, while Ruth is going to get married. Ruth always looks to Maria for advice and approval, and Maria's responses to her vary among love, tolerance, and disgust. Reading scene after scene in which Ruth is so passive can be frustrating. She is content to be molded by Maria, unaware of the danger: She is becoming a person who knows herself only in relation to her friend. When Maria decides she wants to be an artist in New York, the girls both apply to and get into Bard College, where Ruth takes up painting and Maria studies film. Maria sees this moment as her great escape from bleak Pawtucket, while Ruth worries that she, too, is part of the past that her friend wants to leave behind. Maria is clear about one thing. 'When we go to school, we have to go our own way,' she tells Ruth. 'We don't have to be together all the time. We still can be close and be … separate.' In college, Ruth and Maria do pursue different paths and new relationships. The biggest test of their friendship comes when they move to New York City after graduation and both try to make it in the art world of the 1990s. Their childhood competitiveness grows into an adult professional envy: Where Maria meets easy success as a filmmaker, Ruth's path is more complicated, riddled with self-doubt and jealousy. Like a piece of cherished childhood clothing, their friendship appears more and more ill-fitting as time passes. The two grow apart, not because they change, but because they do not; they are stuck in the same dynamics, unable to find new ways to connect to each other. As the novel progresses, Ruth often stops existing on the page, overtaken by her endless loops of fixation on the thoughts and feelings of others. In part because the reader has no insight into Maria's perspective, Ruth's narrative voice makes it hard to discern what either woman gets from their friendship, or even the extent to which they know each other at all. I don't believe that Maria enjoys Ruth's overbearing attention, or that Ruth likes being consistently rejected by Maria. After a final confrontation, the women appear to accept their incompatibility, and their friendship becomes something more distant. But even when Ruth gets a prestigious fellowship at Bard and moves upstate with her new husband, her obsession with Maria never really disappears; it just morphs. If Ruth never stands up to Maria, it's because nothing is worth the risk of losing her. When they're teenagers, Maria asks Ruth to throw away the many portraits that Ruth painted of her; Ruth complies. 'I had a hard time forgiving her for that,' Ruth reflects, though she never tells that to Maria. Decades later, in New York, Maria uses footage of Ruth in a video without asking her permission. Watching herself on-screen, Ruth is unable to 'shake the feeling that there was a violent thrust to the video and that something had been done to me that I hadn't asked for.' Yet when Maria asks her what she thinks, Ruth demurs, telling Maria the piece is 'cool.' 'I would have been content spending the rest of my life walking behind her,' she thinks, as the two women cross the gallery back to their partners. It's an insight that makes the risk of their friendship clear: For Ruth, losing her friend would mean losing herself, too.
San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: 'The Tilting House' is a novel about coming of age in Communist Cuba
Yuri is a 16-year-old orphan who lives simply with her religious aunt in a big, old house in Communist Cuba in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yuri's parents had named her after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin, hoping that one day she would grow up to be a famous female astronaut. Yuri now has vague hopes of being accepted into the Lenin school, Cuba's prestigious preparatory. More Information The Tilting House By Ivonne Lamazares (Counterpoint Press; 304 pages; $27) Yuri and her Aunt Ruth's quiet lives are suddenly turned upside down when an unexpected visitor from 'la Yuma' — slang for the United States — shows up at their Havana home with a camera swinging from her neck and announcing she is family. Ruth later tells Yuri that 34-year-old Mariela is her daughter, and that when Mariela was an infant she sent her to live with a family in the United States through Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S. government program in which thousands of unaccompanied children were sent from Cuba to Miami in the early 1960s. 'The Tilting House,' by Miami-based writer Ivonne Lamazares and due out Tuesday, July 22, is an affecting and sometimes amusing coming-of-age novel set in a country that few have had the opportunity to visit, despite its proximity to the U.S. It's a study of hidden family secrets, the unhealed wound of losing a mother and the quest for home. Lamazares, who was born in Havana, knows her homeland well, and her book is rife with description and historic detail that only someone with first-hand knowledge could provide. Lamazares left Cuba for the United States in 1989 during a period of shortages and deprivation known as 'The Special Period in Time of Peace.' Her first novel, 'The Sugar Island,' also set in Cuba, was translated into seven languages. In 'The Tilting House,' Yuri is quickly pulled into Mariela's chaotic world and her absurd art projects, which include a tragicomic funeral for Ruth's dead dog, Lucho, in a public park using highly illegal homemade fireworks. Ruth, already viewed as suspect by the government as a member of the small Jehovah's Witnesses group, is arrested and sent to jail on unexplained charges. Mariela later tells Yuri that they aren't cousins, but sisters, and that their now-dead mother gave birth to her as a teenager. Mariela insists that their Aunt Ruth 'kidnapped' her and sent her to live in the U.S., where she was raised on a farm in Nebraska. More harebrained projects follow, and the family's tilting house finally tumbles after neighbors and acquaintances slowly chip away at the building to repurpose many of the structure's materials. Yuri later emigrates to the U.S., where she studies and starts a career that allows her to make a return visit to the island. On that trip her past becomes clearer, and she reaches something approaching closure and forgiveness.
