“I'll sing this song now and that will get it over and done with. Early on in the evening and that'll give you a chance to forget.”
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We have 5 guests online| SISTER JOSEPHINE KICKS THE HABIT - DETAILS & DATES |
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The long-awaited musical play Sister Josephine Kicks The Habit, on which the great Jake Thackray was working at the time of his death in 2002 with the playwright Roger Stennett, finally comes to the stage in Jake’s native North Yorkshire in May 2005, produced by TAMAR Scarborough (for STW Associates) in conjunction with Helmsley Arts Centre. Following its opening in Helmsley, the show will form part of the Swaledale Festival 2005, in the locality where Jake grew up and the source of many of his songs. It will then be seen at the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield and in the world-famous Leeds City Varieties, where Jake was discovered singing by a BBC North radio producer, the late Pamela Howe. Later in 2005, the show, which has received funding from Arts Council England, will undertake a nationwide tour. Born and brought up in Yorkshire (and at university in Durham), Jake came to mass public attention through his weekly appearances on BBC Television in the shows of David Frost, Bernard Braden and Esther Rantzen, with such hilarious songs as The Bantam Cock, The Gorilla, The Lodger, Lah-di-Dah, Leopold Alcocks, The Blacksmith and the Toffeemaker, On Again, Miss World, The Widow of Bridlington and, of course, Sister Josephine. These were songs, amongst 80 others which he wrote, which he sang regularly at his solo concerts in large halls (including the Queen Elizabeth Hall) and in virtually every theatre, arts centre and folk club in the UK in a career lasting more than 25 years, mainly through the 1970s and 1980s. And when he retired from touring in the early 1990s, he continued to write, contributing more than 200 weekly columns in his uniquely idiosyncratic style to the Yorkshire Post newspaper. The idea of creating a theatre show from Jake’s work came originally from Ian Watson, director of TAMAR Scarborough and producer of Sister Josephine Kicks The Habit. Announcing the production, he said: “From the early 1990s I had been putting the idea to Jake that the wonderfully eccentric cast of characters he created in his songs - particularly in the On Again! On Again! album - together created a colourful community to compare with the Llaregyb of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Modestly he didn’t accept the comparison, but he was certainly excited about the idea of using those characters and his songs to create a theatre musical.” Playwright Roger Stennett, son of the veteran Welsh comedian Stan Stennett and a successful writer of radio, television and theatre plays for the last 26 years - he claims to be the only writer ever to have worked with both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Sooty - said: “The world according to Jake is a wildly idiosyncratic place, populated by scallywags, transvestite nuns, reticent lonely hearts, belligerent drunks, old-codgerly granddads, amorous animated statues, timid virgins, nice nymphomaniacs, retiring spinsters with potential, accident prone relatives, randy gypsies, amateur magicians, hunchbacked Lotharios, dervish dogs, lusty lodgers, lascivious landladies, retired seafarers, nagging spouses, frigging brigadiers, magistrates taken aback, embarrassing ancestors, bullshitting bulls and a priapic gorilla. What unites them all (including the animals) is a warm, recognisable humanity. In them we see the best, and worst, of ourselves and those we know. Jake’s people are wide-eyed (and sometimes legless), vulnerable sorts, trying hard to make some passing sense of day-to-day life, usually with manic good humour and often failing to come up to the mark with a simple, occasionally sad, pathos.” Tour Dates 2005 Tuesday 24th May (World Premiere) HELMSLEY Arts Centre 01439 771700 Wednesday 25th to Saturday 28th May HELMSLEY Arts Centre 01439 771700 Monday 30 May to Saturday 4 June SWALEDALE Festival 01748 880019 Monday 6 to Wednesday 8 June HUDDERSFIELD Lawrence Batley Theatre 01484 430528 Thursday 9 to Saturday 11 June LEEDS City Varieties Theatre 08456 441 881 For further information, please contact Ian Watson on 01723 367449 (or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ). There are now two websites where you can sign up for updates and announcements. Go to www.sisterjosephine.co.uk or www.sisterjosephine.com. And please, please, pass it on. |