After a punishing summer that flooded the theatre causing thousands of pounds of damage, the Todmorden Hippodrome opens as normal this week for its autumn season with a Victorian extravaganza to mark the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens.
What The Dickens is a free foyer event with food and drink available.
There will be dramatic re-enactments, readings from Dickens’ letters, songs from the musicals and even brand new drama written purely for the evening. You can join in the celebrations this Friday, September 7, at the Hippodrome Theatre, Halifax Road, Todmorden. The doors open at 7pm.
And then things begin hotting up for the risqué-est show the Hippodrome has produced. Rehearsals for Calendar Girls are well under way and the team have already laughed, cried and bared all!
Calendar Girls is the well-known and much loved story of a group of women from the Yorkshire Dales who were inspired to create an “Alternative WI Calendar” to raise money for charity. Their original aim was to raise a few hundred pounds to purchase a new settee for the relatives’ room of the hospital that cared for their friend during his battle with leukaemia.
That was 14 years ago: the ladies involved became minor celebrities and to date they have raised somewhere in the region of £3 million.
The Hippodrome’s recreation of their story promises an evening of emotions and even a little bit of cheek!
Directed by Justine Sutcliffe, the cast consists of some well-known faces - Joyce Fraser, Sue Jones, Christine Kidd, and Dawn-Marie Nicholls - and two new members from Hebden Bridge, Heather Wilson making her acting debut and Moni Noszkay returning to the stage as Annie, channelling the grief for her husband into the new and decidedly risqué project.
Calendar Girls will run from Wednesday, October 10, to Saturday, October 13.
Tickets are on sale now from http://www.todhip.org or from Todmorden Tourist Information Centre on 01706 818181.
For group bookings, call Sylvia on 07722 236837.