Latest news with #LeicesterSquareTheatre
Scotsman
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Queer comedy star David Ian gets uncomfortably honest
TikTok sensation David Ian returns to the Edinburgh Fringe, asking the one question that queer men fear the most... Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... After a TV special on OUTtv and amassing over 2.5 million views on social media, it's time for David Ian to face the music. He's got a fabulous talent for being mean, but how? Why? Where did this talent come from? When a pal told David he should try being a little nicer, it got David thinking - am I mean? Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad David himself says: "A question I never thought I'd have to ask until someone I really liked told me I was. Isn't that just my personality? Let's find out together!' Your favourite mean gay just got self aware... A rising star of the UK queer comedy scene, David was a semi-finalist in Leicester Square Theatre's New Comedian of the Year and sold out his previous shows Mediocre Gay and his debut Fringe hour (Just a)Perfect Gay. Off stage, David is the founder of the Milli Group and the co-founder of The Queer Comedy Club in London. He's also hosted Pride events across the UK as well as featuring on The Guardian, BBC Radio and Times Radio. Expect big laughs, gloriously filthy punchlines and a touch of introspection in a show that's equal parts heartwarming and savage. Stand-up, LGBTQ+ 30 July -24 August (not 11 and 18), Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, Coorie @16:20 (1 hr), From £9, 16+ Audience participation, Strong language/swearing
Daily Mirror
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Beloved rock star 'speaks from beyond grave' amid heartbreaking final wish
DR Feelgood legend Wilko Johnson is heading to the West The guitarist, one of the forefathers of punk, died aged 75 in 2022. He once joked he would love to have made opening night of a play about him that was in the works. Sadly, that was not to be, but he would be thrilled Wilko: Love and Death and Rock 'n' Roll is heading to the Leicester Square Theatre. He once told the play's writer Jonathan Maitland: "I dunno if I will make opening night? I might be brown bread but there is nothing I can do about that - but otherwise I would be there applauding like mad. I just hope you enjoy the show." The play has had two well received runs already at the Queen's Theatre in Hornchurch, East London, last year, and South London's Southwark Playhouse this spring. It went down a storm with audiences and was snapped up for the West End by theatre bosses. Unseen footage: Wilko Johnson opens up about his excitement over a play about his life shortly before his death (Image: Daily Mirror) Producers say the play, which stars Johnson Willis as Wilko, "explores the extraordinary events when [he] was told he had one year to live in 2012" after being diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer. It adds: "Refusing all treatment, he decided to spend his last months living meaningfully. Seeing the people, places and things which meant most to him during his life until a miracle happened." That miracle came when, against the odds, tests showed the cancer was not as aggressive first thought. The legendary punk artist died in 2022 (Image: Getty Images) He had the tumour removed and was declared cancer-free. By then he had already gone on a farewell tour and bagged a role as the executioner in Game of Thrones. Wilko, born John Wilkinson in Canvey Island, Essex, formed pub rock band Dr Feelgood with singer Lee Brilleaux in 1971. Early singles included She Does It Right, Back in the Night and Roxette. Their 1976 live album Stupidity topped the charts. But in 1977 Johnson left the band after a bustup. In 1980 he joined Ian Dury's band The Blockheads and had a lengthy career touring with the Wilko Johnson Band. His wife Irene died of cancer in 2004. They had two sons. ? Wilko: Love and Death and Rock 'n' Roll runs from July 3-27 . Tickets at
The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ken Russell's Tommy reviewed – archive, March 1975
It is at least arguable that Tommy (Leicester Square Theatre, AA) was not only the first but the best rock opera yet written. Now we have it, in blasting Quintaphonic sound, flung at us from the screen by the amazing Ken Russell. Take your earplugs and possibly a sedative, put on your dark glasses, but go. Some of it is quite extraordinary, a battering but exact synthesis of sound and images the like of which only Russell, of contemporary film-makers, could achieve. Even if you think he's the most irritating director in the world, you have to allow that to him. By his own lights, he could scarcely have done better. Tommy, for the benefit of those who haven't yet seen or heard it, is a parable about a boy who grows up deaf, dumb and blind after a traumatic experience in his youth, somehow survives a series of miracle cures, becomes pinball champion of the world and, finally freed of his disabilities, turns into the Superstar Messiah. All this is built round music that, to some extent, defuses it of portentousness since it is culled from the experience of a group (The Who) that has been one of the most musical around even when Pete Townshend was smashing up guitars. What Russell has done is to marry their work to his style with an abandon that at least gives it freshness even if it often diverts the total experience along different channels. Certainly he has vulgarised, but a rock opera without that quality would seem a contradiction in terms and not much to do with the pop scene from which it was generated. Some sections of the film, such as the superb Pinball Wizard sequence with a mammoth-booted Elton John, the Acid Queen scene with the magnificent Tina Turner and two numbers with Paul Nicholas and Keith Moon as Tommy's tormenting babysitters, are perfectly matched to the songs that the imagination boggles at Russell's audacity and the way he can bring the impossible off by believing in it so utterly. At other points, it will be all too much for those who find Russell hard to take and a combination of him and The Who even harder. Even so, there are some stunning, and stunningly energetic performances to admire which match step for step what Russell is trying for on the screens. Roger Daltrey's innocent, blank-eyed Tommy, Ann Margret and Oliver Reed as his hapless prole parents, and Jack Nicholson in an all-too-brief cameo role as a spurious specialist give everything they have, and sometimes more than we thought they had, to the general-cause. And the sight of leering Reed, striding around Russell's approximation of a fifties Butlin's in teddy boy gear or of Ann-Margret having a nervous breakdown in a torrent of baked beans will live with me for a good deal longer than the film will run. Which is probably a very long time, since Russell going all out in the pop field is an experience that makes the recent spate of disaster films seem like pigmy pinpricks on the subconscious. The experience, like it or not, is quite something.
