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Pride Cymru’s BIG Weekend line-up announced!

Courtney Act, Gabrielle, Saara Aalto, SuRie, The Sundaes, Angie Brown and Hazel Dean are among performers appearing at Pride Cymru’s BIG Weekend from August 24-26.

On Saturday, August 25, a parade will take place around the streets of Cardiff, which will see 10,000 people walk the mile-long route in the city center. Families, individuals, groups and organisations are all welcome to join the parade to showcase diversity and equality across Wales.

The theme for this year’s event is #ProudToBeMe. The campaign aims to encourage members of LGBT+ communities and beyond to use their voice and be proud of their identity.

40,000 people are expected to attend the event on Cardiff City Lawns over the BIG Weekend in the celebration of inclusivity and diversity, staged annually by Pride Cymru.

There will also be entertainment from Glee Comedy Club, a Cabaret Stage, a UV Roller Disco, a Bingo Lingo takeover and beach party. As well as this, there will be food, drink and market stalls at the family event, which will run on August Bank Holiday weekend.

Scott Davies, Pride Cymru’s Big Weekend’s Event Director, said: “This is the biggest event in our calendar, and we’re so pleased to bring the public such amazing and talented performers this year. We can’t wait to enjoy the weekend with our incredible community.”

In a speech at the campaign’s launch last month, Pride Cymru’s Chair, Lu Thomas, said: “Pride Cymru reflects who we are as a community and as a nation. It is a celebration of equality, a commitment to ensure that everyone is able to live their lives free of hate.”

For full line-up and tickets, click here:

REVIEW: Return to the Forbidden Planet @Devonshire Park Theatre

Return to the Forbidden Planet

Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne

What do you get when you cross a jewel of a regency theatre, with a Shakespearean tale of magic and star crossed lovers, full throttle rock and roll and even throw in a roller-skating trombone AND therein playing robot?

Bob Carlton’s sci-fi musical, inspired by The Tempest – Return to the Forbidden Planet, that seriously weird jukebox musical. The first of its type and never surpassed this collection of scenes and characters and just about most of the plot from The Tempest is spliced and morphed together with some of the most memorable music from the golden age of rock and roll. Done with style, even if not with much sophistication, with a cast who fully commit and have the musical ability to back up the absurdity on stage.  This is fun with a capital F.

The cast are all superb, they boldly go, all the singers filling the sometime unforgiving acoustic space of the Devonshire Park with belters, and with a huge range of musical abilities. They are certainly full of energy and the amount of training to get the highly choreographed movements right, or deliberately wrong (wink wink), is testament to the amount of work that has gone in to this slick and engaging production.

With sets from Julie Godfrey which nod to more than a half dozen different Sci-Fi shows and some fun projections which added great value to the show, including a rather clever take-off scene from the grounds of the theatre itself and a fun first appearance from the monstrous destructive cephlapod ID of Dr Prospero. Director Chris Jordan has pulled it all together with just the right amount of tongue in cheek-bugger-the-fourth-wall silliness and seamless musical segues from musical director Dan de Cruzto ensure it all works.  On paper is always sounds like a real rag bag of a show but on stage, in the hands of such charming performers, this thing flies!

It’s a seriously odd show, shuttling Shakespeare up against rock and roll, review theatre, musical comedy and some slick and silly audience participation. It’s a real curates egg, but not withstanding it’s weirdness, it’s fun and in this case, with their full octane performances the cast give every ounce of their energy to ensure the show rockets into the high end of fun from the off.

There was a lovely moment where Cookie the Base was doing some seriously wild riffing on his guitar, howling and screaming the chords with real passion, filmed in close up and with as much passion as could be muster, a shoulder axe throw pulled the lead out of his guitar and all was silence, he continued to act like hell, the band ploughed on, he grappled with the lead, reinserted it and went on to bring the house down. It looked rehearsed but was one of those serendipitous moments of pure show business which only thrilled the audience more. Great stage tension is always rewarded.

The packed house was well up for this kind of musical high campery and loved every moment of it, laughed at every pun, even the bad ones, even the rotten ones, and clapped for more. The standing ovation at the end was well deserved as this young cast worked themselves into a sweat to entertain us.

All that, some very cheap drinks at the bar ( you get change!!) and then the most romantic drive back across the downs and along beachy head with a huge sliver of creamy crescent moon hanging over Seven Sisters, blissful.

Well worth the jaunt!

Until September 1st.

For more info or to book tickets see the Devonshire Park Theatre website here:

 

FEATURE: The Face of You – Madonna at 60

There’s something I’ve just got to say by Craig Hanlon-Smith.

ON July 13, 1987, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone stood on stage at Madison Square Garden in New York City midway through her Who’s That Girl Tour set to address the audience. The show was an additional date added to the schedule in memory of her friend Martin Burgoyne who had died from AIDS related complications the previous year and it raised $400,000 for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR).

Madonna’s long association with the gay community was then unchartered territory in comparison to what it would become, but at a time when celebrated gender bending queer courting artists were running for the hills only to return wearing grey suits and a heterosexual partner for fear of any connection with AIDS crisis, Madonna gorged out a line in the concrete and stood up.

Only four years earlier rock legends Queen had all but closed their career down in the US with their I Want to Break Free video (in which they appeared in drag), and here Madonna risked total alienation from a conservative record buying public and stuck her neck out. Whilst celebrated artists adored by their gay audience were calling upon their following to repent and accept either the love of Jesus or the AIDS ridden wrath of God, Madonna’s friends were sick and dying and therefore she knew other people had friends who were sick and dying and so held out a hand when it seemed no one else was interested, to help. It was a brave move.

On June 24, 1990 as part of her celebrated Blond Ambition Tour Madonna again dedicated a show to AMFAR in memory of her friend Keith Haring who had recently died raising an additional $300,000. At every date on her Girlie Show Tour in 1993 she dedicated her song In This Life to two of her friends who had died as a result of AIDS. I stood in the audience at Wembley Stadium as she towered above my head on that huge stage and said “To those of you out there who are suffering, and to those of you out there who know someone who is suffering, don’t give up hope”. These were still the days before effective HIV treatment and combination drug therapies, HIV was a passport to early death. And it is not that Madonna did not know how important those actions and words were at the time, she should be celebrated for exactly knowing how important it was for someone at the height of their fame and influence to speak up for a community that was dazed, desperate and dying. The ’93 London show speech was eventually broadcast on BBC Radio One in December of that year, a speech that other international broadcasters edited out from transmission.

In September 1998 during another surge in her popularity following the release of the multi-million selling Ray of Light album, Madonna attended the 14th Annual Aids Walk in Los Angeles delivering an impassioned speech concerning the US Government money spent on an investigation into President Clinton set against the federal investment into AIDS treatment and research, again I listened to it broadcast on news channels thousands of miles away. She has attended awareness and fundraising dance-a-thons bringing international media attention to the event and issue, and more recently on the U.K leg of her Rebel Heart Tour spoke with kind warmth support of the HIV community at her London show which happened to coincide with World Aids Day. And let us not forget her 15 million selling Like a Prayer album came with a safe sex/AIDS awareness leaflet created and inserted into every copy sold at her personal request. These stories alone would cement her as my hero, but that is not all.

Madonna’s Express Yourself Don’t Repress Yourself career mantra has been picked up by the LGBT+ communities and championed by almost every Drag Queen performer across Pride events the world over for almost thirty years, but the connection with people who are different runs much deeper than an adopted phrase or musical anthem. Madonna has often included homoeroticism in her music videos, implicitly in Open Your Heart, Express Yourself and Vogue more explicitly in Justify My Love and Erotica to name a hand-full, also through her much-maligned Sex book but it was her 1991 tour documentary Truth or Dare/In Bed with Madonna that ripped the lid off any uncertainty and screamed “I’m supporting these people and if you don’t like it, I don’t care”.

There is of course the much talked of gay kiss between dancers Gabriel Trupin and Salim Gauwloos playing out in packed cinema theatres two years before the Hollywood blockbuster Philadelphia, an Oscar-winning film addressing the AIDS crisis and containing multiple examples of male gay relationships without managing to even suggest any form of physical affection whatsoever. In Madonna’s movie, we saw only a kiss but one so electric we knew those gays were fucking, and this gay boy sat and watched that film week after week after week and thought “this is what they mean when they shout ‘fucking queers’ – there they are!” And it was life changing. If those men up there on that massive screen can do it then I can go home and do it in my lonely gay bed. That moment watched again and again gave me hope, belief and determination to stick with it. She showed us prejudice within her own band of brothers when her only straight dancer is filmed saying of his gay colleagues “I don’t have no kind of respect for these people”. We knew it wouldn’t be easy but we didn’t feel alone; Madonna’s got my back and I can do this.

Throughout her career and especially these last fifteen years as she has dared to stick around Madonna has continually been verbally assaulted and attacked in the media and pub alike. Sexist, misogynistic, ageist vitriolic bile centred around her age, sexually provocative imagery, adoption, charity work, fashion choices, veiny hands, forays into musical genres considered too young, and all from journalists, male, female, philosophers, academics, feminists, television presenters, former partners personal and professional and perhaps most unkindly artistic contemporaries.

Both sophisticated and unsophisticated requests for Madonna to go away and be quiet but she who will not be quiet will neither go away and it is this strength and determination to exist that binds her to me as a forty-six year-old gay man and my fellow members of our widening LGBT+ communities. We too are told when we request and expect to be heard that we should be grateful, that we are aggressive for requesting equality and a voice and in simple terms to ‘shut up’. Even now in 2018 when verbally assaulted in the street in broad-daylight rather than get angry I can ask myself “What would Madonna do” and I see her on stage in 2012 as part of her MDNA tour, shirt off and painted onto her skin across her back the statement ‘No Fear’.

Happy Birthday Madonna. This queen salutes you, today and every-day, now and forever. Amen.

@craigscontinuum

Train fare increases announced

Train fares to increase by 3.2% from January 2019.

TO coincide with confirmation of the 3.2% train fares hike announced this morning, Labour has compared the costs on several train routes in the South East between when the Conservatives came to power and the projected new prices that will be implemented this January 2019.

The average commuter in the UK will now be paying £2,980 for their season ticket, £786 more than in 2010.

Those travelling on the Brighton – London and Hove to London routes will be paying £1290 more to travel to work than in 2010.

Average fares have risen more than three times faster than wages and in Theresa May’s own constituency the cost of an annual season ticket from Maidenhead to London Paddington has risen by £831 since 2010.

The amount by which train companies can raise regulated fares is the responsibility of the Transport Secretary Chris Grayling MP who has the power to enforce this. However, the Secretary of State choose to write a letter to the trade unions asking for rail staff to accept a pay cap.

By making no similar request for the bosses of train companies to take a pay cut or for shareholders to refuse dividends, the trade unions accuse him of letting the train companies off the hook again.

Labour has committed to keeping fares down and pegged to no more than a rise of CPI. Labour has also called on the Government to freeze rail fares on the routes most severely affected by the timetable changes – Govia Thameslink, Arriva Rail North and First Transpennine Express.

Jeremy Corbyn MP
Jeremy Corbyn MP

Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party, said: “Today’s train fare increases are an insult to everyone who has suffered from the chaos on Britain’s railways.

“The Government’s shambolic mismanagement of our railways has been a national embarrassment and they must now step in to freeze fares charged on the worst performing routes.

“Labour will take back control of our railways by bringing them into public ownership so they are run in the interests of passengers, not private profit.”

Andy McDonald MP
Andy McDonald MP

Responding to Chris Grayling’s comments on rail fare increases, Andy McDonald MP, Labour’s Shadow Transport Secretary, said: “This is a pathetic attempt by Chris Grayling to shift the blame for Tory fares policy. The amount by which train companies can raise regulated fares is the responsibility of the Transport Secretary. He has the power to enforce this, he’s just choosing not to.

“The Secretary of State has washed his hands of years of industrial action on the railway, saying it was the responsibility of train companies, but is now intervening over staff pay. At best this is a distraction technique and at worse a recipe for years of industrial action.

“Chris Grayling made no similar request for the bosses of train companies to take a pay cut or for shareholders to refuse dividends. The men and women who run the railway are being singled out while greedy train companies are let off the hook yet again.

“The truth is that our fragmented, privatised railway drives up costs and leaves passengers paying more for less, not staff.

“The railways need serious reform, not a plea to train companies, but Ministers are persisting with a failed model of privatisation that is punishing passengers and taxpayers. Instead, Labour would use money saved from bringing passenger services into public ownership to cap regulated fare rises at the Consumer Price Index.”

EDINBURGH FESTIVAL REVIEW: Dietrich – Natural Duty @The Pleasance Courtyard

Peter Groom is one of the outstanding performers at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe in his magnetic recreation of Marlene Dietrich.

IT would be wrong to call it an impersonation. That doesn’t do justice to the subtle, nuanced delicacy of his languid, sensuous portrayal of the singer and film star who fled Nazi Germany, to return with the US army to entertain the troops.

With his hooded eyes and pencil – thin mouth he exudes glamour in a wonderful golden glitzy gown and huge wig.

Peter IS Marlene- a faultless performance of thoughtfulness. This is the star looking back and also being in the moment of Berlin’s 1945 liberation by the Allies.

The songs all comment on the story and his/her easy sexuality are exactly suited to the double entendres and innuendo in songs like They call me naughty Lola – my little pianola keeps working night and day .  All the favourites are here –  Lily MarleneI May never Go Home Anymore – another innuendo song – but the strongest two renditions are a tear-provoking Where Have All The Flowers Gone? and a beautiful sad German ballad Don’t ask me why I cry.

She ends predictably with Falling in Love Again, fabulously understated.

Asked by an off-stage journalist if she believes in the after-life, she says no, but Peter Groom’s spectacular performance belies that, and his stunning portrayal will introduce a whole new generation to the immortal Marlene.

It’s 5 stars all the way.

Dietrich is running at the Pleasance courtyard Edinburgh until August 27.

Review by Brian Butler.

LETTER TO EDITOR: Happy Birthday David

David Raven was inspirational and so supportive of the ambulance service that I started in Brighton in 1991, the Regency Division of St John Ambulance, to transport people with HIV/AIDS to the Sussex Beacon and other places of care.

Sadly, most people died of AIDS during that period. It was a difficult time when HIV could have been described as the modern-day equivalent of Ebola. Little was known about how it was transmitted and there was a fear amongst many – including Health Care professionals – at that time.

The gay communities in Brighton and Hove, gay pubs and clubs, Fudges and Casalingo Restaurants, and performers on the gay scene, such as Maisie Trollette, Dockyard Doris, Lola Lasagna, Dave Lynn, Drag With No Name, Miss Jason, Phil Starr, and Andre Adore (my apologies for any unintentional omissions) were our sole source of income to purchase three ambulances (one brand new) and to fuel and maintain them; this wasn’t a cheap activity!

All our ambulance staff (including myself) undertook this 24/7 caring work as totally unpaid volunteers. Brighton Council kindly provided us with free training and storage facilities in New England House as we enjoyed the support of each successive Mayor of Brighton (pre City status).

David Raven was our lead and most prolific supporter and I (plus hundreds of now deceased patients) will always be grateful for his tremendous and active support; we wouldn’t have been able to help so many very sick people retain their dignity without the help of David and others as we received no other financial assistance – not even from St John Ambulance.

Thank you David Raven, you deserve all your accolades on this your 85th birthday.”

Terry Wing
Proud holder of the Golden Handbag Community Volunteer award

Video courtesy of Latest TV.

Celebrity garden raises money for cancer centre

Tony and Chris Ashby-Steed open their garden as part of the Macmillan Coastal Garden Trail.

THEY were raising money for the Macmillan Horizon Centre in Brighton and despite the awful wind and rain which affected visitor numbers especially on the Sunday, they managed to raise an impressive £1270.50.

The Mayor of Brighton and Hove, Cllr Dee Simson popped by for a cup of tea and to enjoy the garden.

The Trail is organised by renowned gardener Geoff Stonebanks who writes regular columns in The Argus, has appeared on Gardeners World and has a regular slot on Dig It on Radio 2.

Twenty four gardens stretching from Hove to Seaford opened on the trail this year, raising a grand total of  £7442.98, which, considering the weather was very impressive.

Chris and Tony had the honour of being selected to open their garden twice on May 7 and July 1 this year for the National Garden Scheme 2018 raising £2096.40 for NGS charities.

They will be opening their garden this Sunday, August 19, probably for the last time ever and hope to go out with a bang and raise as much money as they can for the good causes supported by the National Garden Scheme, which last year raised £3.1million.

Go along and support the couple, spend some time in their lovely garden and treat yourself to lots of yummy cake for sale with tea, coffee and cold drinks.

There will be some home-grown plants for sale, others donated by the Goldcliff Garden Centre, in Lewes and a tombola.

You will find the boys at 70 Dale View, Hove, BN3 8LB. The garden will be open from 11am-5pm.

Photos by Tyrone Darling

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