THEATRE INTERVIEW - Liam Doyle (Wicked)

WICKED INTERVIEWS:
Part Two - Liam Doyle (Fiyero)

Wicked flies in to the Birmingham Hippodrome this week as part of it's first ever UK and Ireland tour, and as part of our WICKED WEEK celebrations, we've brought you interviews with two of the show's leads.

Last week, Kyle chatted with leading lady Nikki-Davis Jones, who plays Elphaba on the tour, and this week we conclude our interviews by chatting to Midlands native Liam Doyle, who plays Fiyero in the show. We discuss his unusual path into performing professionally, returning to the Midlands with Wicked, and landing his dream role...

By Kyle Pedley.
Interview Conducted Thursday 24th April 2014.

Liam Doyle as Fiyero in Wicked

“I’m worried that I’m 23 and doing the part that I always wanted to do... it’s just downhill from here!”

Actor Liam Doyle is humbly, and jokily, assessing exactly what it means to him to have bagged his self-confessed dream role at such a relatively young age. The Coventry-born performer is of course speaking of Fiyero, the dashing, debonair leading man of musical colossus Wicked, which continues it’s first ever UK tour this week as it opens for a summer tenure at the Birmingham Hippodrome.

“It’s amazing. It is the part that I always wanted to play, it’s a part that I always kind of identified with.”

BLOOD BROTHERS - THEATRE REVIEW

BLOOD BROTHERS AT THE WOLVERHAMPTON GRAND THEATRE

Theatre Run: Monday 29 April - Saturday 4 May 2013

Performanced Reviewed: Monday 29 April (Press Night)

Reviewed by Kyle Pedley

Despite perhaps not being as instantly synonymous as the likes of say Mamma Mia!, Les Miserables or much of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s output, Blood Brothers is undoubtedly one of the big musical success stories of the past few decades both here and overseas, becoming the third longest-running musical production in West End history during it’s London run before embarking on a string of highly successful tours such as the one which this weeks arrives at the Wolverhampton Grand. Based very loosely on the ideas and themes of the Alexandre Dumas novella The Corsican Brothers but transposed to a distinctly English (see: Merseyside) setting and tale, Blood Brothers is a hearty, and indeed weighty, musical experience which brilliantly manages to be both somewhat epic yet also focused and intimate. It brushes upon melodrama, frequently plays with heightened foreboding and artistic ambiguity (in the form of a not altogether-detached narrator), dips into a broad spectrum of ideas and issues both social and psychological, and yet for all of this remains accessible, sincere and for the most part at least, a surprisingly jovial, good-natured and well-paced piece that feels it’s almost three hour running time for all the right reasons. This is heavy, investing yet undeniably entertaining musical theatre that seems to have come via the Les Miserables school of emotional hard knocks, taking you on the tour de force of highs and lows on a grand yet decidedly human yarn populated by believable characters and all-too familiar problems writ large.