David Pendlebury – Sweeney Todd

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David is co-starring as Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd at The English Theatre Frankfurt from the 31st of October until the 9th of February before transferring to Munich from the 5th of March to the 16th. 

Sweeney Todd is one of Sondheim’s most beloved & acclaimed musicals with 10 Tonys & 10 Oliviers under its belt and tells the infamous bone-chilling story of the vengeful bloodthirsty barber Sweeney Todd and his pie-baking partner Mrs Lovett plucked straight from the pages of the Victorian Penny Dreadfuls. 

Founded in 1979 and housed on the ground floor of the Galileo skyscraper, the 300-seat English Theatre Frankfurt is continental Europe’s largest English-speaking theatre, with more than 60,000 patrons attending its wide variety of shows from classics and comedies to musicals and thrillers. 

For more information click here 

For David’s profile click here

 

Daniel Jacob – RuPaul’s Drag Race UK

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Daniel will be starring as his drag persona Vinegar Strokes in the first ever season of the smash-hit drag queen competition RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, starting This Autumn on BBC Three.

Hosted and produced by multi-award winning drag queen, model, singer, dancer & actor RuPaul, Drag Race has been running for 11 seasons in America with multiple spin-offs has finally arrived in Britain!

RuPaul and her fellow esteemed judges, Michelle Visage, Graham Norton and Alan Carr, will be judging the performances and outfit-making skills of ten drag queens ranging in age, appearance and experience all in the hopes of finding Britain’s next top drag superstar. 

Jacob’s drag persona Vinegar Stokes, known as the Female Whoopi Goldberg, is a dynamite combination of wit, comedy, stunning vocals and dance moves – the very definition of a triple threat. Her personality is more down-to-earth than some and aims to inspire those from working-class families or those whose lives and surroundings are very repressive and don’t let people express who they truly are. 

Daniel is also a very accomplished musical theatre performer in his own right, currently performing every night in the West End as Sandra Bollock in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and has previously featured in Joseph, Aladdin, and Angelina Ballerina the Mousical. 

For Daniel’s profile click here

For more about Vinegar Strokes click here 

For more Information on Drag Race UK click here

For the Reveal Trailer click here

 

 

Florence Beaumont – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

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Florence Beaumont will be making her professional debut in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at The Union Theatre from the 2nd of October. 

Based on the best selling novel of the same name, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the delicious story of a platinum crowned goldigger from Little Rock and her escapades to find herself a rich man.

Florence graduated from Bird College earlier this year. 

For More information: Click here

For Florence’s profile: Click here

James Vaughan – The Capture

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James guest stars at a Judge in the debut episode of the BBC’s major upcoming conspiracy thriller The Capture airing later this year on BBC One. 

A story set in the modern day landscape of misinformation and”alternative facts” where intelligence services have extraordinary technological capabilities, it sees a man being blamed for a crime he didn’t commit but where the visual images used as evidence have been so drastically and accurately manipulated it supposedly irrefutably incriminates him.

With this man’s arrest the conspiracy soon escalates into a multi-layered web of manipulated evidence and the characters are caught in a world where nothing is as it seems. With soldiers, police, lawyers and spies lost in their own personal struggles and with their love lives entangled in a myriad of deceptions and double-crosses they must try to overcome all of these obstacles in order to determine the truth.

For more information click here

For James’ profile click here

 

David Pendlebury – Hello Again

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David is set to co-star in Michael John LaCuisa’s Hello Again at The Union Theatre from the 28th of August until the 21st of September.

Adapted from the 1897 play Reigen by Arthur Schnitzler, this new musical explores the fine line between love and lust through a series of dalliances and sexual encounters between ten characters throughout the 20th century. 

This adaptation follows the structure of the original material very closely and includes a highly eclectic score ranging from opera to ’70s disco.

Better known under its French title La Ronde, the play was the absolute scandal of its age. Privately published in 1900 amongst Schnitzler’s friends, it was published publicly in Vienna in 1903 before being swiftly banned by censors.

It wasn’t performed publicly until 1920 in Berlin and then in Vienna in 1921 where its deep scrutiny of the society’s sexual morality and class ideology elicited extremely violent critical and popular reactions, sadly rooted in extremely anti-Semitism with accusations that Schnitzler was a Jewish pornographer and even charges of immorality brought against him in 1921 which were thankfully dismissed.

As a badge of honour (or perhaps dishonour), father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud wrote to Schnitzler in 1922 saying: ‘You have learned through intuition – though actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons.’

For more information click here

For David’s profile click here

McLean-Williams at the Edinburgh Fringe 2019

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This year McLean-Williams has three shows with our clients in as part of the month-long arts extravaganza that dominates the entirety of Edinburgh with over 2.5 million tickets sold for nearly 3,400 across 300 venues in 2017 and numbers only increasing since then!

Max Percy co-stars in George at the Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) from the 31ast of July until the 26th of August. Having already received glowing reviews when it was performed at the Camden People’s Theatre this spring, Contingency Theatre’s brand of wild physical performance with pitch-dark humour arrives at the Fringe. It tells the story of a man named George (shocking I know but bear with me) and the life-changing opportunity he gets to meet the mysterious “J”, leaving his old life behind and setting off on a course of self-discovery revealing the howling madness of modern living.

For tickets and information click here

For Max’s profile click here

Jenny Sawyer – Shrek The Musical

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Jenny is currently winging her way to Australia for auditions as preparations are in place for the Australian premiere of Shrek The Musical.

The show will open on the 1st of January in Sydney before venturing on to Melbourne and Brisbane for a month each before closing on the 28th of June.

The show is being produced by John Frost of The Gordon Frost Organisation. 

To read more about the production company click here

To see Jenny’s profile click here 

Boris Heistand – Overwatch

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Boris is the voice of Sigma, the newest addition to the ever-expanding roster of playable characters in the wildly popular video game Overwatch.

Developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment, the minds behind the genre-defining Warcraft and Starcraft series, it is a team-based first-person-shooter in which people play in two groups of six each playing as a single “hero” from a talent pool of over 30 all with their own unique play-style. They then use teamwork and skill to either secure/defend control points on a map or escort a payload across the map before the timer runs out.

Sigma (real name Siebren de Kuiper) is a brilliant Dutch scientist and astrophysicist who falls under the “tank” archetype of the Overwatch roster, meaning he’s designed to soak up damage and attention from the other team leaving the others to go about their business securing locations or killing off members of the rival team. 

In an attempt to understand the fundamental mechanics of the universe he was involved in an experiment that went catastrophically wrong, leaving him deeply psychologically damaged but with the power to manipulate gravity. He is crafted into a living weapon by Talon, a terrorist organisation lead by Doomfist (another playable character) who believe that humanity is made stronger by war and conflict; and let loose on the battlefield.

Sigma has joined a stacked roster full of incredibly varied and eccentric characters including a Japanese cyborg ninja, a literal cowboy, a Swedish dwarf, a Brazilian DJ, a genetically-enhanced gorilla from the moon and a hyper-intelligent hamster who rolls around in a heavily-armoured wheel strapped with heavy ordinance.

To get a sense of how mind-blowingly popular this game is during the first year of its release (2016) Blizzard Entertainment made over $1 billion in revenue and had more than 40 million players worldwide after two years. To put that into perspective, if every single person living in Canada played Overwatch at the exact same time, you’d still be over 3 million people short.

The reveal trailer for Boris’ character has already reached 4.7 million views in 2 days and is, at the time of writing, the top trending video on Youtube. 

Overwatch is also a widely-played esport, with an entire league, creatively named the Overwatch League, of 20 international teams playing in a fully-fledged sports leagues with points, tables, play-offs and a championship final worth $3.5 million to the winners, the most recent being our local team London Spitfire. There have even been calls to have esports, including Overwatch, as part of the Olympic Games. 

For Boris’ profile click here

For the reveal trailer click here

For more information click here

 

 

Reginald Edwards – Brighton Beach Memoirs

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Reg is co-starring as Jacob “Jack” Jerome in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs as part of the Frinton Summer Theatre running from the 23rd of July until the 27th.

Directed by Frinton’s General Manager & Co-Artistic Director Edward Max, it tells the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story of Jewish Polish-American teenager Eugene Morris Jerome living in Depression-era Brighton Beach, the neighbourhood in Brooklyn New York not the British seaside town.

Eugene experiences puberty, sexual awakening and his search of identity all while trying to deal with his unhappy and financially insecure family living under one room including his mother and father, his widowed aunt, his older brother and two cousins. 

Brighton Beach Memoirs is the first of Neil Simon’s “Eugene Trilogy”, continuing with Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound.

Sadly passing away last August at the age of 91, Simon wrote over 30 plays and has the record for most combined Oscar and Tony nominations of any writer, penning consistently successful plays from 1961 until 2003 garnering the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991 and having a theatre on Broadway named in his honour in 1983, becoming the only living playwright to receive such an honour. 

Sabina Franklyn – A Belly Full

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Sabina played the role of Rose in A Belly Full at The Mill in Sonning, which ran from May 2nd until June 15th. 

Playwright and Director Marcia Kash who, along with fellow writer Mary Colin Chisholm, have created this uplifting world premiere for The Mill.
 
When Marnie drags her much put-upon bestie Jane to a belly dancing class they are swept into a shimmying circle of sometimes endearing, sometimes outrageous women.
Their friendship is tested through the demands of their spouses, babies, work lives and the arrival of some unexpected roommates.
 
Through all the belly aches, dilemmas, betrayals and some very ‘special’ cakes, the two friends learn to face life’s challenges as they prepare for a special charity night at their local Turkish restaurant. 
 
To read more about the play click here
 
To view Sabina’s profile click here