Calendar Girls

What a great choice for the lead-up to the Festive Season! This Calendar Girls is family-friendly and focuses on the comedy of how to keep photos of mature nude women posing for a calendar, decent and artistic. They succeed!

It’s based on a real 1960s event in Yorkshire. Meredith Sinclair, Janice Hancock, Marie Millette, Amanda McErlean, Rachel Hunt and Kath Kunde portray the six friends who agree to try to raise money to provide decent accommodation for relatives of sick patients in a local hospital. They work as a tight ensemble, a joyous, inspired group of friends, yet each with her own reservation when it comes to revealing all for the camera and public exposure. With amusement we recognise ourselves in similar situations.

The personal comedy of the first act switches to coping with the offence of their straitlaced Yorkshire Womens Institute, whose ‘teddibly proper’ rules of behaviour disapprove of the calendar. That these women side-stepped this obstacle to raise hundreds of thousands of charity dollars for the cause is now legend. What an inspiration for aspiring altruists!

Lorraine Wilson, Diane O’Beirne, Justin Harreman, Jeff Cummings and Trevor Jones all provided confident, well defined supporting characters.

This was a triumph for Director Lynne Wright and her efficient technical staff.

Jay McKee