Stepping Out

LLANELLI Little Theatre will be ‘Stepping Out’ at Llanelli’s Theatr Elli for the first time in over five years.

The group will be taking centre stage with Richard Harris’s award-winning play from Thursday, November 18 to Saturday, November 20 at 7.30pm.

According to director Julian Murphy, Stepping Out is not a dance show, but a play about people who dance.

The characters that turn up at a weekly church hall tap-dancing class are a bunch of misfits. We meet Mavis, a failed aspiring dancer who dreams of making it big on stage, but is forced to settle for teaching a bunch of amateurs how to dance.

The cast are a mixed bag of women of assorted sizes and varying degrees of incompetence and the single man is shy and self-effacing Geoffrey.

The play’s warmth and humour stems from the stumbling attempts to follow Mavis’s steps, but then things get serious when the group is booked to appear at a charity show. The title also relates to the way in which the characters reveal themselves during the play.

Stepping Out was turned into a film in the early 1990s with Liza Minnelli, Julie Walters and Shelley Winters taking lead roles.

The Little Theatre cast has been busily rehearsing the tap-dancing routines for the past four to five months under the guidance of choreographer Eve Dalling.

The cast includes a number of Little Theatre regulars including Kathy Bowen, Gerry Larkin, Marie Edwards, Jacky Lewis, Alana Cater-Sheehan, Graham Phennah, Ann Benjamin, Diane Williams, Sonia Harries and Mike McCauley.

Also making their debut are Eve Dalling-Owen, Lorna Russell, Ceri Benjamin, Ruby Crouch and Yolanda Murphy.

Tickets are £7.50 and are available from the Theatr Elli box office which is open Monday to Friday 11am to 6pm and Saturdays 2pm to 6pm or telephone 0845 22635 10. Tickets are also on sale at from Bizy Fingers in Llanelli Market.

 

PICTURE CAPTION: Pictured from left to right are some of the Llanelli Little Theatre cast of Stepping Out: Ceri Benjamin, Sonia Harries, Gerry Larkin, Kathy Bowen, Marie Edwards, Alana Cater-Sheehan, Jacky Lewis, Yolanda Murphy and Graham Phennah.