The Girls Are Back in Town
Above: Gary Barlow and Tim Firth, co-writers of new musical - The Girls
In the New Year Sardines was invited to attend an exclusive rehearsal of Gary Barlow and Tim Firth’s new musical, The Girls, which happens to be previewing at London’s Phoenix Theatre right now.
With both writers in attendance, producer David Pugh, the West End cast, as well as the ‘real’ W.I. calendar girls, Paul Johnson got the lowdown on the new show and how the story about a group of Yorkshire women has come to be so intrinsically linked to amateur theatre.
In 1999 eleven members of Rylstone & District Women's Institute in Yorkshire had the idea of posing nude for a 2000 calendar in order to raise some extra funds for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research, following the death of W.I. member Angela Baker’s husband, John, from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma the previous year.
The story of this ‘alternative’ W.I. calendar soon became national, international and then world news, resulting in sales of over 200,000 which, in turn, led to a multi-award-winning film in 2003 called Calendar Girls with a screenplay by Tim Firth. Featuring a star-studded British cast including Helen Mirren, Julie Walters, Linda Bassett, Annette Crosbie, Celia Imrie, Penelope Wilton and Geraldine James, the film grossed almost $100m worldwide. But of course the story doesn’t end there...
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