The Royal Court Theatre is a theatre located at 1 Roe Street in Liverpool, England. The current Royal Court Theatre was opened on 17 October 1938, after fire destroyed its predecessor. It was rebuilt in Art Deco style and soon became Liverpool's premier theatre. The interior of the building has a nautical theme, in line with Liverpool's seafaring traditions. The design of the basement lounge was based on the Cunard liner Queen Mary until its conversion into the Studio space during renovations. There are three viewing levels within the main auditorium: the Stalls, the Grand Circle and the Balcony.
Robin Mark Askwith is an English actor and singer who has appeared in a number of film, television and stage productions.
Widow Twankey is a female character in the pantomime Aladdin. She is a pantomime dame, played by an older man.
A pantomime dame is a traditional role in British pantomime. It is part of the theatrical tradition of travesti portrayal of female characters by male actors in drag. Dame characters are often played either in an extremely camp style, or else by men acting butch in women's clothing. They usually wear heavy make up and big hair, have exaggerated physical features, and perform in an over-the-top style.
Philip Lawrence Borg-Olivier is a British actor, model and stage performer best known for playing the role of Tim "Tinhead" O'Leary in the soap opera Brookside.
Martin Christopher Jarvis is an English actor, presenter and writer who has appeared mainly on children's television for the BBC since 1992, apart from 2000 to 2002 when he was working with ITV and Channel 4. In 2019, he started a radio station for children called Little Radio.
First Family Entertainment was an entertainment group specialising in pantomime and other family theatre entertainment, formed in January 2005 as a joint venture between the producers David Ian for Live Nation and Howard Panter for the Ambassador Theatre Group.
Cissie and Ada, in full Cissie Braithwaite and Ada Shufflebotham, are a comedy drag act featuring two fictional housewives from Northern England. The act was created and played by the comedian Les Dawson and the comic actor Roy Barraclough on television in the 1970s and 1980s.
Michael Starke is a British actor and singer from Liverpool, England. He played Thomas 'Sinbad' Sweeney in Brookside, the Channel 4 soap opera, for sixteen years.
Ieuan Rhys is a Welsh actor. His television work has included thirteen years in the BBC Cymru soap opera Pobol y Cwm, Seargent Tom Swann in the last series of A Mind to Kill and six series of the Welsh-language version of Mr & Mrs – Sion a Sian for HTV. For the last four series he portrayed Eurig Bell, the "not to be messed with" Deputy Headmaster in S4C's Gwaith/Cartref.
Aladdin is a musical written by Sandy Wilson for the newly refurbished Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Although not a pantomime, it played during the theatre's inaugural Christmas pantomime season of 1979/80, opening on 21 December 1979, and starred Richard Freeman as Aladdin, Joe Melia as Tuang Kee Chung, Aubrey Woods as Abanazar, Ernest Clark as The Emperor, Martin McEvoy as The Genie, Elisabeth Welch as Fatima and Christine McKenna as Badr-al-Badur.
John Joseph Linehan, MBE is an Irish entertainer, most known for his drag queen character May McFettridge. Linehan has, in character, been a long-running feature on local radio and television, as well as a regular pantomime dame.
Helen Noble is a British actress best known for her role as Abby Davies in the British soap opera Hollyoaks from 2001 to 2004, with a brief return in 2005. She is also now an acting coach for kids and directs incredible performances.
The Wyvern Theatre in central Swindon, Wiltshire, England, opened in 1971. It is managed on behalf of Swindon Borough Council by Trafalgar Entertainment. The auditorium has 635 seats, all designed to be within 70 feet of the stage.
Tony Maudsley is an English actor. He is best known for his portrayal of hairdresser Kenneth Du Beke in the hit ITV sitcom Benidorm, and George Shuttleworth in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street (2020–present).
Nellie Wallace was a British music hall star, actress, comedienne, dancer and songwriter who became one of the most famous and best loved music hall performers. She became known as "The Essence of Eccentricity". She dressed in ultra-tight skirts — so tight in fact, that she would lie down on the stage and shuffle back and forth on her back to pick up whatever she had contrived to drop. Her hat sported a lone daisy, feather, or fish bone, and once even a lit candle — supposedly, so she could see where she was going and where she had been.
Ada Blanche was an English actress and singer known early in her career for vivacious performances in Victorian burlesque and pantomime and later in character roles in Edwardian musical comedy.
Dorothy Ward was an English actress who specialised in pantomimes, playing the principal boy roles, while her husband Shaun Glenville would play the dame roles. She had a successful 52 year career and played in over 40 pantomimes between 1905 and 1957.
The Prince's Theatre was a theatre on Park Row in Bristol in England which was built in 1867 and was destroyed by bombing in 1940 in the Bristol Blitz during World War II. Owned by members of the Chute family for most of its existence, at one time the theatre was the Bristol venue for many of the country's leading touring actors and theatrical companies in addition to being one of the most renowned pantomime houses in the country before briefly becoming a music hall and latterly a cinema. The actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry made their last appearance together under Irving's management at the Prince's Theatre in The Merchant of Venice in 1902.
Johnnie Cullen and Arthur Carthy, known as Cullen and Carthy, were a British comedy double act who achieved popularity on the British and Irish music hall, circus and variety stages over a career spanning a period of four decades, beginning in the latter part of the Victorian age to the post-war years of the 1920's. Their partnership lasted from 1890 until Cullen's death.
