This is a one-woman show featuring Heather Macnab from Maple Creek. Macnab has an extensive background as an actor, director, facilitator and music festival adjudicator and clinician for speech arts and a fondness for musical theatre. She has been on the stage with Medicine Hat Musical Theatre and been part of the Calgary Opera Chorus, as well as directing 20 seasons of youth musicals in Maple Creek.
She has been involved with the Summer School for Solo Voice in the Battlefords for a number of years and says she is looking forward to bringing this production to the Battlefords.
Macnab performs as a speech artist, singer and pianist and loves to put people on stage. For this play, the only person she’s putting on the stage is herself.
The story is simple. Inside Mrs. Joe Bradshaw – mother of two grown children – is the former Shirley Valentine, longing to get out. Her hope and self-confidence badly shattered by school, marriage and life, she is reduced to talking to the kitchen wall whilst preparing her husband’s evening meal. As she sips a glass of wine she dreams of drinking in a country where the grape is grown. She compares scenes in her current life with what she used to be like and feels she’s stagnated and in a rut.
In 1988, Shirley Valentine won an award as the best new comedy in England after opening on the West End and in 1990 the show appeared on Broadway with great success and was later made into a movie.
It’s an adult show with some mature language but is a beautiful and still timely play. Macnab says she believes the point of the play is that whenever we are in life, we can have a reawakening and that life is to be lived fully.
Seating is limited to keep everyone safe and those attending are being asked to wear masks and to be prepared to abide with other COVID-19 safety precautions that might be in place at that time including proof of vaccinations.
Get your tickets soon by calling 306-446-3133 or email [email protected].
You will see another play by Willy Russel later in the Battlefords Community Players season as they produce “Educating Rita.”
Be safe! See you at the theatre.
