Writer Tim Firth and Take That star and composer Gary Barlow are collaborating on The Girls, a musical version of the film and stage play Calendar Girls, which will have its world premiere at the Leeds Grand on 14 November 2015 (for a six-week run) before transferring to the Lowry Centre in Salford from 13 to 30 January 2016.
Firth, who wrote the screen and stage adaptations of Calendar Girls, has been friends with Barlow for three decades. They grew up in the same village – Frodsham in Cheshire – and have been working on the show for more than two years.
News of the production was revealed near to the area where the story began, at Burnsall Village Hall, just outside Skipton, North Yorkshire. Barlow told the Yorkshire Post that the intimate setting for the private workshop was vital to the project. “We always said, if we can’t play this in a village hall we shouldn’t put it on a stage. If it has to rely on a big production and lights and a big band we shouldn’t be writing this. It has to exist with a piano and some people on stage. And we’ve done it.”
Leading the workshop were cast members Joanna Riding and Claire Moore, with the other ‘girls’ played by Sally Dexter, Debbie Chazen, Michelle Dotrice, Rachel Lumberg and Harriet Thorpe.
The show will be co-directed by Roger Haines and Tim Firth, designed by Rob Jones, with comedy staging by Jos Houben, lighting design by Tim Lutkin and sound design by Terry Jardine and Nick Lidster. David Pugh and Daffyd Rogers are the show’s producers.
In 1998, John Baker, the husband of Angela Baker, a member of Rylstone Women’s Institute, died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The idea for a nude calendar was put forward in order to raise money for the local hospital, where he’d received care. The ladies, including Angela (who attended the workshop with five of the other original ‘girls’), posed naked with cakes and flowers strategically placed in order to protect their modesty.
The calendar became a sensation in the media and £4 million has been raised for leukaemia and lymphoma research as a result.
Not only that, but the story has already been adapted into a film starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters (2003) and a stage production (2008) which has toured the UK twice.
According to the Daily Mail’s Baz Bamigboye, who attended the workshop, £750,000 worth of tickets for The Girls was sold within a matter of days.
* Gary Barlow has also penned the music and lyrics, along with Eliot Kennedy, for the Broadway show Finding Neverland (the book is by James Graham). The musical, inspired by the 2004 film of the same name based on the story of Peter Pan writer JM Barrie, premiered at the Leicester Curve in 2012 and a revised version was staged in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2014. The Broadway premiere at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater opens on 15 April.
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