STEPPING into the glitzy cabaret set of Copacabana, it was time to relax and enjoy the musical theatre world of Ryedale Youth Theatre, where "music and passion are always the fashion".
Oh yes it was - a success! From the minute the curtain went up on Abanazar, the wicked magician played by the highly talented Alun Nixon, audiences knew they were in for a pantomime evening of music, fun and humour.
Jimmy Carr, Repeat Offender, Grand Opera House, York, Wednesday and Thursday
WHEN you have comic timing, like the immaculate Jimmy Carr, even the luck of the comedy gods can fall your way.
THE luminous green programme is printed in recycled paper, a decision typical of Marcus Romer's funky and fun, earthy but sharply aware new staging of Raymond Briggs's cult children's story.
HISTORY has it that George Orwell was going to call his futuristic final work 1948 - the year he wrote it - until his publisher suggested 1984. Not so in Roy Smiles's biographical play, where Orwell says he chose 1984 as it would be a Year Of The Rat, to tie in with the rat cage in Room 101.
JOHN Godber wrote Our House for Hull Truck's 30th anniversary in 2001, staging the first half of his Chekhovian drama in a warehouse, the second in the main auditorium as the story moved inside from the garden.
THE screaming pom-pom waving children who filled York's Joseph Rowntree Theatre on Wednesday evening loved every minute of Disney's High School Musical.
Helena Blackman, BBC's How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? runner-up, did her theatrical reputation a great deal of justice in Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific.
DANIEL Bye, new part-time artistic director for this renamed company, brings to the stage his first show, We'll Meet Again, billed as "the most ambitious the company has ever attempted".
ASIDE from the revival of Alan Ayckbourn's interlinking Intimate Exchanges octet in Scarborough, no set of plays by one writer on a Yorkshire stage has been more rewarding than Richard Bean's run at Hull Truck.
CRAVING fame is nothing new. Andy Warhol once allocated everyone their 15 minutes, talent or no talent, Lou Reed or Edie Sedgwick, but there is a difference today.
ENGLISH Touring Theatre's return to the Theatre Royal after a two-year hiatus is cause for celebration in itself, but all the more so for Chekhov's tragi-comedy being directed by Sir Peter Hall (whose revival began life as the inaugural show at Kingston's new Rose Theatre in January).
NICK Lane's first stage adaptation of George Orwell's nightmare vision for Hull Truck had a cast of five: not a number that would suit a youth theatre even on the smallest of Scottish islands.
WHAT a cracker of a show. The company of the Chisinau National ballet served up a feast for the senses with its impressive corps de ballet of dancers and large orchestra.
DIRECT from the West End and Broadway, Patrick Barlow's highspeed adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's spy thriller The 39 Steps arrives at York Theatre Royal on March 25 for a five-day run.
