As a unique arts festival, the Gay Theatre Festival Dublin aims to play a distinctive role in developing a vibrant and sustainable profile on the Dublin theatre scene. Using the skills and experience of principal Directors and Executive Committee built up over the last six years organising the old International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, they aim to resource and facilitate artistic performance thus aiding artists to realise their artistic ambitions. The Festival is staffed by professionals on a voluntary basis. The Gay Theatre Festival Dublin will be centred around the city's Temple Bar area.

 

 

Members and guests free.

 

From Jamaica to the Julliard, and from there to a glittering career, bass-baritone Willard White has been thrilling audiences worldwide for almost 40 years. With his rich, powerful voice and compelling dramatic presence, he moves with ease from opera to musicals, from spirituals to his highly successful Paul Robeson tribute. All this repertoire and more will feature in his RTÉ CO debut - a treat for anyone who wants to hear a glorious voice in full flight in an evening of wonderful songs, arias and spirituals. 'Pity anyone who appears on the same platform as baritone Willard White. He has so much presence he can eclipse an entire symphony orchestra and chorus with a mere twitch of an eyebrow.' Guardian, 2009

 

 

Following a hugely successful season in the Gaiety Theatre in May 2009, where it received an almost unbroken run of standing ovations, and a West End Premiere, Lane Productions are delighted to announce that THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION will return to the Gaiety Theatre by popular demand for a limited run.

 

A newly commissioned solo exhibition that explores the complex and historical world of spectatorship. Adopting the early special effects technique of matte painting, Sander uses and quotes the visual intricacies associated with illusion, while critically examining the personal motivation of consumers who participate in spectator industries. Tourism, audiences, the traveller and the curious are all characters who take time out of everyday life and pay to see things. The gallery will be transformed into a single, circular screen, providing a constantly changing and looping landscape. Sander contrasts the simplicity of matte painting with the complexity of the current economic unknowns that form the background to many of our lives.

 

THE FIRST DUBLIN SHOW EVER starring the world famous, international award winning performers STEVEN BRINBERG and RICK SKYE. Dublin is set to sizzle with sequins and screams this May with the world's most sensational singing superstars BARBRA & LIZA LIVE - enjoy the biggest gay affair in showbusiness when you can expect outstanding musical performances, fine-writing, comedy, characterizations, prolific gossip and spine-tingling vocal mastery. Two Superstars - One Stage. When you hear Steven Brinberg as BARBRA singing 'Evergreen', 'Memories', 'Close To You' for the first brief moment you almost think "My God, is that really her?"(Streisand) It's so captivating. Not only does he have a wonderful take on her and an innate ability to imitate her, he also captures a lot of moments and nuances that leave you breathless. Steven created 'Simply Barbra' in 1993 and played a record breaking five year run in New York winning both a MAC AWARD and a BISTRO AWARD. Having performed at Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Centre and the Library Of Congress, he branched out to 28 US States and 8 countries worldwide. Steven has performed as Barbra at special celebrity events (sometimes at the request of Miss Streisand's management) for the likes of Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Joan Rivers and for Barbra Streisand's best friend, Donna Karan. Rick Skye impersonates LIZA with unsurpassable energy and comedy - through clever re-wording of classic hits and mimicry, Liza becomes an icon de force of hilarity and ingenuity. Rick Skye works his way through sharp parodies of such diverse songs as 'Mein Herr', 'Maybe This Time' and 'Sara Lee'. Along with a pair of unquestionably alluring legs, his tribute with a twist includes a 'new' Charles Aznavour song, a screen test for the upcoming musical film 'Sunset Boulevard', a 'Happy Endings' production number and a tribute to 'one of her famous parents'. As THE TIMES reported "Skye's channeling of LIZA the unbowed superstar, is sensational!".

 

Beating Berlusconi! is based on the true story of a Liverpool fan who ended up sitting next to Silvio Berlusconi at the Attaturk Stadium. Despite threats from his wife and bank manager, middle-aged Kenny Noonan travels to Istanbul to watch Liverpool play AC Milan in the Champions’ League final. He carries the scars of thirty years as a Red and of living in a city which has been demonised. When the Reds equalised, Kenny couldn't suppress his feelings, Berlusconi lost his temper and the two squared up. Hauled away by Turkish security guards, Kenny was amazed to be taken to the Liverpool VIP area - they had mistaken him for a Liverpool VIP. Fresh from ecstatic reviews and huge word-of-mouth in 2009, Paul Duckworth and his forty characters take to the road again in this hilarious, lump in your throat comedy. This show contains strong language.

 

Drawings and paintings from Ukraine. Ukraine defines itself by opposition to its bordering states. It is not Russia, not Poland, not Tatar… It views its Soviet past as another country, yet the past is omnipresent: the border is porous. To the outsider Ukraine is also a fantastically beautiful space where the borders between the structures of civilisation – houses, tower blocks, railways – are constantly being assailed by nature. Everywhere there is green.

 

Ever changing and unique to each performance, an active score unfolds and adjusts in front of you. Like a dream half remembered, a future half imagined, Sunstruck is a poetic elegy for light, dance and sound. Elegant and evocative, Sunstruck will leave an indelible mark on your imagination. Long time collaborators Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham join forces with some of Australia’s finest performers, including dancers Trevor Patrick and Nick Sommerville, in a structure that challenges their collaborative history. Helen Herbertson has been creating award-winning dance performance for over three decades. She was recently recognised with the Kenneth Myer Medallion for Outstanding and Distinguished Contribution to the Performing Arts. Ben Cobham’s lighting and design work has been a striking and influential contributor to the dance and theatre scene in Melbourne for over fifteen years and has won numerous awards.

 

Direct from Amsterdam for this IRISH PREMIERE, top Dutch comedian Johan Goossens reads from his personal diary about his years of puberty. Funny, compelling and naive. A Tragi-comic, Hilarious Pathos.

 

 

 

Ladlane formed in 2004 in Dublin. The band features Eugene Quinn from Templeogue, Dublin on guitar/banjo/vocals, Ray Dempsey from Ballyduff, Co. Waterford on accordion and Colm Keane from somewhere in north county Dublin on fiddle/vocals.

 

This WORLD PREMIERE adapted by Rocket Theatre's Artistic Director, Martin Harris, is a black comedy exploring fate, duty, and love. This brand new show satirises upper-class morality and is full of wonderfully Wildean logic and sparkling wit.

 

This IRISH PREMIERE direct from London's King's Head Theatre and following in the footsteps of the award winning 'Lord Arthur's Bed', THEATRE NORTH return to Dublin with a daring and provocative new show 'NAKED HOMO'.

 

Si nn ricordo male is a monologue recited by two voices. Dancing the traces that memories leave in the body, it is an expansion in movement of the instant when memories begin. NNChalance was established in 2007 by Eleonora Gennari and Valeria Fiorini, with the intent of researching a personal choreographic language. Si nn ricordo male won a prize at the Giovane Danza D’Autore Emilia Romagna competition. Your girl is a performance about desire. Downstage a woman slowly feeds her clothes into an industrial hoover, while whispering ‘he loves me, he loves me not’. Upstage, a man makes a hanging sculpture of socks. Posing questions about how we view desire and love, Your girl, based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, invites us to look again at the character of Emma Bovary and at the body of actor Chiara Bersani to see the tenderness that can exist between a man and a woman in this moment.Having trained with Lenz Rifrazioni, Alessandro Sciarroni undertook his first independent creations in 2007. Your girl was selected for the Dro International Performance Prize, Centrale Fies.

 

 

Rod Stewart may have begun his career as a respected singer, yet that critical respect eroded as he got older, as he became more concerned with stardom and adult contemporary songcraft than the rock music that launched him.

 

DDF is proud to present two works by legendary choreographer Yvonne Rainer. RoS Indexical invokes the passion and furore that accompanied the notorious premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913. Audiences were outraged by Stravinsky’s dissonant score, by the drab tunics worn by the dancers and their percussive, earth-bound movements. Dancing as a quartet of individuals, four remarkable performers take on Rainer’s mission of achieving a re-vision of this disruptively glorious work. Spiraling Down, Rainer’s newest dance, draws its inspiration from a variety of sources—newspaper photos, soccer moves, old movies, ballet, Steve Martin, Sarah Bernhardt, and even Rainer’s own disinterred dances from the 1960s—to create an eerie resonance that is both melancholic and unpredictable.

 

WORLD PREMIERE by Elizabeth Moynihan, Zebbie Award Winner 2009 Irish Playwrights and Screen-Writers Guild of Ireland for Best New Radio for 'The Cider Queens'. Bartie is the only butcher in the town of Swan. Bartie's son Canais arrives home unannounced from Australia after an absence of ten years. Cepta, his twin sister, has had a career change and a spell in prison for unlawful sex with a minor, Rose, her student. It's the eve of Mammy's birthday and she has not returned from her pilgrimage to Loch Derg. Family drama overflows amidst cake and celebrations, with long-held recriminations, accusations and resentments rising to the surface. Elizabeth Moynihan is an exciting new writer to watch and after her success at the 2009 Absolut Gay Theatre Festival with 'Walnuts Remind Me Of My Mother', she returns with another incisive view of family dusfunction in rural Ireland.

 

The EUROPEAN PREMIERE of 'TENNESSEE SUITE' begins with 'THE TRAVELLING COMPANION' - a late self-portrait by Tennessee Williams, set in a New York City hotel, it depicts a standoff between an aging writer, much like Williams, and a young man.

 

 

 

 

Presented by Hamlet Sweeney.

 

EUROPEAN PREMIERE. ONE FIRE ESCAPE. TWO MARTINIS. THREE TWISTS. In post 9/11 New York City, two young men discover that random casual encounters are rarely casual and often have little to do with chance.

 

The IRISH PREMIERE of 'WEEPIE' is a startling blend of the savage and the sublime. While this might sound gloomy, the play is not... much of it is hilarious. In November 1994, two nineteen year old, upper middle class students Richard Elsey and Jamie Petrolini were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Mohammed el-Sayed. The victim had been stabbed 16 times in an attack which began as he waited in his car at traffic lights. There was no obvious reason for the murder. The victim was unknown to the perpetrators and there was no racial motive. The killing destabilised notions of respectability and bewildered public and media alike. In an audacious mix of tense drama and hilarious comedy, 'WEEPIE' addresses that bewilderment, pulling apart youthful notions of masculinity in a heady mix of absurd ritual, eroticism, magic realism and hard-hitting drama. Contains Nudity and Strong Language. Not suitable for persons under 16 years of age.

 

Jonathan Ansell, who won the heart of the nation as lead vocalist in X-Factor runners-up G4, has been cast in his musical debut, starring in Bill Kenwright’s production of Jim Steinman and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down The Wind. The musical shows how powerful love can be when the innocence of childhood collides with the cynicism of the adult world. In a stunning combination of multi-award-winning songs, powerful all new staging and epic storytelling, Whistle Down the Wind is a record breaking theatrical sensation that is both mesmerising and moving.

 

Price includes light lunch. TOM HICKEY is one of Ireland's best-loved and most distinctive actors. A founder member of the Focus Theatre, he has been a regular on the stages of The Abbey and The Gate for many years, creating some of the major roles in Irish drama. MICHAEL HARDING received the Stewart Parker Award for new writing in 1990 and he has continued, ever since, to be lauded for his work both as a playwright and novelist. His plays have been produced by The Abbey Theatre, as well as internationally, and he was elected a member of Aosdana in 2000. Michael writes a column for the Irish Times every Friday - Displaced in Mullingar - chronicling small town life in the Irish Midlands.

 

‘It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood’ Over 400 years after it was written, Shakespeare’s dark depiction of ambition, guilt and murder continues to send a shiver down the spine. Macbeth’s sword is still wet with blood when he returns victorious from battle, a loyal servant to his King and a hero amongst his comrades. But when three weird sisters cross his path with mysterious prophecies, Shakespeare’s fearsome tragic hero comes face to face with his most fierce opponent yet – his destiny. Swayed by promises of greatness and the demands of a power-hungry wife, Macbeth swathes his way to power – and moral decay. Rooted in the Irish landscape at the time of Cromwell, this muscular new production from director Jimmy Fay (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Playboy of the Western World, Ages of the Moon) lays bare the darkest side of human nature. Macbeth continues our commitment to presenting the work of William Shakespeare and follows our productions of Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and The Comedy of Errors. We are delighted that Aidan Kelly will play Macbeth and Eileen Walsh will play Lady Macbeth in this thrilling new production.