Newcastle-under-Lyme’s New Vic is promising “a summer to remember”, with plays by Alan Plater and George Bernard Shaw among the highlights.
Plater’s BAFTA Award-winning play with music about the adventures of an all-girl swing band, Blonde Bombshells of 1943, will start the season.
A co-production with Oldham Coliseum, Blonde Bombshells is filled with 1940s classics by Glen Miller, the Andrews Sisters and Fats Waller which will be played live by a swing band.
The show runs at the New Vic from 16 May until 8 June.
New Vic artistic director Theresa Heskins will direct George Bernard Shaw’s first play Widowers’ Houses from 14 until 29 June.
“Part romantic comedy, part family drama, it asks some awkward questions about the skeletons that lurk in even the most respectable of closets.”
Paul Warwick, who directed Tom McGrath’s Laurel and Hardy at the New Vic in 2007, returns to the Staffordshire theatre-in-the-round to direct Marie Jones’s comedy phenomenon Stones in his Pockets from 5 until 27 July.
No New Vic summer would be complete without a visit from David Graham Productions with their latest “ultimate ‘60s musical”. This year’s production is Uncle Eric in Downtown Abbey. This “upstairs downstairs adventure filled with comedy, nostalgia and the greatest hits of the 1960s” is at the New Vic from 19 until 31 August.
One-nighters at the New Vic include Ballet Wales with A Midsummer Night’s Dream on 19 June and Barry Cryer with his new show Twitter Titter on 15 July.
Meanwhile the New Vic’s education department has joined forces with the Royal Shakespeare Company to bring the power of Shakespeare’s language to life for hundreds of schoolchildren.
Over the next three years, the theatre-in-the-round’s education team will be working with schools across the region as part of the RSC’s learning and performance network—the RSC's long-term partnership programme with schools, communities and theatres.
The project will include a visit from the RSC early next year with a production designed to "engage young people and the wider community".