THE Highlights Rural Touring Scheme is hitting the road again in the coming weeks bringing top quality stage performances to villages and other rural venues
All together, 14 village venues across rural County Durham will host shows.
Spoofs, adaptations, tributes and new writing all feature in a spring programme of physical, visual and comedy theatre, music, dance, stories, puppets and poems.
In a programme that includes more award-winning shows, companies and performers than ever before, the season is not short on highlights.
The season kicks off at Hamsterley Village Hall on Saturday, February 24, when the Gonzo Moose Theatre Company performs The Thing That Came from Over There – a comedy inspired by 1950s sci-fi B movies.
In other shows, Olivier-nominated actress Elizabeth Mansfield performs her homage to Edith Piaf; contralto Lucy Stevens explores the life of composer and suffragette Ethel Smythe; Fringe First winner, Luke Wright descends into a world chaos in verse-play, Frankie Vah and poetry legend and Bard of Barnsley Ian McMillan entertains with hilarious poems and stories.
Jazz legends Alan Barnes and David Newton and Newcastle’s Rob Heron and the Tea Pad Orchestra appear in a musical menu covering swing, blues, folk, jazz, Americana and Zulu dance.
For children there’s two adaptations of old favourites – Wind in the Willows and The Giant Jam Sandwich – among others and dance features too, thanks to a continuing partnership with the national Rural Touring Dance Initiative which aims to bring great quality dance out of main theatres and into rural venues. This season sees the brilliantly imaginative, Chalk About featuring dance, chalk and chat.
With the support of Highlights, promoters choose, promote and host shows for their communities.
Companies – many of which work with some of the country’s main stages, opera houses and international festivals – choose to tour their work on the rural networks because they say it offers a unique opportunity for artists to meet and entertain people up close.
A Highlights spokeswoman said: “With shows that take us from the Arctic to the Antarctic, performed by companies from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands, audiences can journey somewhere nice this spring from the comfort of the village hall.”
