A night of music, dance and fun. The interactive experience had the audience up dancing. The show featured local musicians and singers and a ceilidh dance or four.

Review:

This show took us from Bantry Bay to Derry quay, from Galway to Dublin town, via Garboldisham village hall.

Fresh from depicting the Communist party in Diss Museum’s History of Politics parade, the group unleashed their musical talents.

Led by their resident Irishman Cathal Prendergast, they presented a whooping evening of traditional and modern numbers, with ceilidh dancing by the audience.

So we had well-known classics like The Wild Rover but also songs associated with U2, Christy Moore, Ed Sheeran, The Cranberries and The Chicks. I knew half a dozen of the 18 songs.

A quiet start, as if in an Irish pub, grew into a stage full of singers belting out The Fields of Athenry. No passengers here.

Roy Preston’s gravelly Whiskey In the Jar rivalled The Dubliners, followed by a lickety-split Star of the County Down by ‘Lewis and Harry’.

Four times the audience were invited to dance and surged onto the floor to reel and strip the willow.

Solos and duets galore, each as good as the last, provided an Irish evening to remember.

It was lusty, romantic, sentimental, with both joy and a kind of positive melancholy, without the shadow of the gunmen.

An unforgettable dinner party like no other. Reviewing songs from shows such as Oklahoma, Half a Sixpence, West Side Story and much more.

Review:

This musical revue was more of a cocktail than a dinner party – When We Are Married meets Mama Mia.

A slender plotline provided sufficient reason for an evening of songs from the shows, bringing back memories of the dear departed Mere Players.

The programme included crowd pleasers like Oliver and Half a Sixpence but also meatier shows like Company.

The potency of cheap music, in Coward’s phrase, was never so apparent as an engaging cast took us from the Oklahoma plains to New York’s West Side and the old East End of London.

Singing in the Rain was given a new slant by being performed by six tap dancers.

Solos from West Side Story (Harry Diggins), The Mikado (Roy Preston) and Oklahoma (Suzanne Stevens) were delivered with aplomb.

Duets, notably from Carousel (Karen Stephenson & Sean Lilley), Little Shop of Horrors (Cathal Prendergast & Sadie Catton) and others, were heartfelt.

Feed the Birds, from Mary Poppins, had a sweetly memorable rendering by Celia Baker, Karen Stephenson and Monica Barrell.

Under the musical direction of Andrew Wheeler, the company choruses – Flash Bang Wallop, Oom Pah Pah, Oklahoma, Get Me to the Church – dispelled the gloom of hardship in the outside world.

“You’re doing fine, Palgrave Players, Palgrave Players, okay!”

Director: Felicity Humfress

Musical Director: Andrew Wheeler

Producer: Cathal Prendergast

Set partly in a music hall and partly in the surrounding East End London streets and buildings, the play is a musical reconstruction of incidents relating to the East End murders which took place between August 31st and November 9th, 1888.

Review:

Director Felicity Humfress and her late husband Steve lifted local drama when they came to this area.

Jack the Ripper, for Mere Players, was one of their many striking productions.

Soaring hire costs and shameful treatment helped to sink that group who, for over 40 years, had been as much of a local institution as the museum.

But there was a warm glow of reminiscence as many familiar faces got together to help launch Palgrave Players, at Botesdale Village Hall.

The play is a music hall version of the Whitechapel murders of 1888; just as ‘Allo, ‘Allo is a version of the French Resistance.

But the East End, the land of “stop muckin’ abaht” and boiled beef and carrots, reveres its villains, turning out in force for the Krays’ funerals.

The feeling of a Mere Players reunion, with added fresh talent, created a bonded company experience.

There was spirited singing, with final victim Sadie Catton standing out, and rollicking music by Andrew Wheeler at the keyboard.

Experienced actors like Roy Preston, a commanding Chairman, and Gary Stodel, gothic in his topper and black cloak as the killer, strode the stage again.

The gang of wide boys bumbled amusingly; and the ladies of the night were a spunky bunch, if (in the writing) some way from the pathetic creatures of reality.

Costumes, by the director and Kim Archer, were as good as we remember them; and Kathy Mills’ choreography helped things move with a swing.

As a memento mori for Mere Players, the show touched the heart, while hailing a new dawn for Palgrave Players.