Building on its hugely-successful Community Engagement Scheme, West Yorkshire Playhouse is taking the exciting new family play with music Little Sure Shot on a tour of eight community venues across Leeds in April and May. The show, which tells the inspirational story of sharpshooter Annie Oakley, will tour to venues in Armley, Hawksworth Wood, Burmantofts, Chapeltown, Gipton, Rothwell, Seacroft and Middleton.
Last year West Yorkshire Playhouse launched its ground-breaking Community Ambassador programme by taking Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads out to seven different Leeds areas supported by an audience development initiative. In the course of the year the Playhouse has built on this scheme, with hundreds of heavily discounted tickets for shows at the Playhouse given out for £3 a head, as well as workshops and other initiatives in the community venues.
By popular demand, the next community tour is a family show. Little Sure Shot will visit those original seven venues plus an additional eighth venue in Chapeltown as well as the Courtyard Theatre at the Playhouse.
Little Sure Shot has been created by the all-female team of director Amy Leach, writer and composer Lucy Rivers and designer Hayley Grindle. The show tells how Annie overcame poverty and hardship to become the most famous female sharpshooter in the Wild West, becoming the star attraction in Buffalo Bill’s touring Wild West Show with her amazing gunslinging skills.
Playing Annie is one of West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Graduate Actors, Verity Kirk, who comes from Harrogate. The cast also features two other Graduate Actors,David Leopold and Paksie Vernon, alongside Andrew Whitehead and Andy Clark. West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Graduate Actors scheme gives new actors long-term contracts to appear in a number of shows as well as to be based in and learn about how a busy producing theatre works.
Little Sure Shot, a co-production between West Yorkshire Playhouse and the egg, Bath, can be seen in the Courtyard Theatre from 15-18 April.
The Playhouse’s Community Engagement programme is supported by The Liz & Terry Bramall Foundation and Asda Foundation.
Suitable age 7+
Courtyard Theatre performances 15 April, 6.30pm; 16-18 April, 2 and 6.30pm.
Box office 0113 213 7700 and online wyp.org.uk
West Yorkshire Playhouse has a reputation both nationally and internationally as a leading UK producing theatre. The theatre is a cultural hub, a place where people gather to tell and share stories and to engage in world class theatre. From large scale spectacle to intimate performance the Playhouse develops and makes work for the stage, for found spaces, for touring, for schools and community venues. Alongside work for the stage the Playhouse is dedicated to providing creative engagement opportunities, building and running sustainable projects that reach out to a diverse range of communities. Supporting new and emerging artists is key and the theatre provides creative space for new writers, emerging directors, companies and individual theatre makers to refine their practice. Work for 2015 includes a new version of UNCLE VANYA directed by Mark Rosenblatt, LITTLE SURE SHOT – a new commission by Lucy Rivers, THE RISE AND FALL OF LITTLE VOICE directed by James Brining and the redevelopment of Brining’s award-winning production of SWEENEY TODD with the WNO and WMC.