Rose, the meddling momager of nightmares has been resurrected for this year’s Royal Exchange Christmas musical. The wannabe star is back to put Kris Jenner and her daughters June and Louise in their place with her endless supply of gumption. With enough energy to power the Round, Rebecca Thornhill subbed the role of Rose for Ria Jones in the performance I witnessed. Playing a washed-up and pushy stage mother, living vicariously through her children is not an easy sell. Howeve

Harold Brighouse’s 1916 play based in Salford, follows a conservative shopkeeper named Hobson as he attempts to raise his three independent daughters alone. With sound advice like “it’s a man’s world” echoing off his shop walls, you may be surprised that Hobson’s outdated views have been revitalised in an adaption that infuses the original story with an inventive twist. Writer Tankia Gupta brings the 1880’s cobbler shop to the 1980s, transforming the shop grounds with sarees

Royal Exchange audiences are kept in the middle of old rivalries as the Sharks and Jets fight over their turf. In a classic love story that reimagines Romeo and Juliet's houses as rival street gangs, the Montagues and Capulets are given light and jazzy choreography in a contemporary adaption that pins American/Jets and Puerto Ricans/Sharks on the rough streets of New York. The original 1957 Broadway production, directed and choreographed by the Tony award-winning Jerome Robbi

Moulded by differing opinions shaped by age, culture and language, Barber Shop Chronicles travels across six cities where we witness open and ongoing conversations ranging from relationships, football and the use of the n-word. The community cultivated in these spaces offer an opportunity for black men to express themselves free from a society that has built its rigid image of black masculinity around tough, macho men. From the first scene the show layers common stereotypes d