So, did you hear the story of the Johnston twins?

My Spring is going to be CRAZY; and that's because Manchester has decided to put so much good theatre on pretty much all at once. So expect quite a few reviews in the next couple of months...

And here's the first one that I went to see this month (Mamma Mia was in February), the UK Tour of Willy Russell's Blood Brothers, which I saw at Manchester's Palace Theatre. Like ALW and Tim Rice's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, Blood Brothers was originally performed by schools, then was performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and then toured the UK several times before Russell decided to let it transfer to the West End in the 1980s, where it stayed for around 20 years.

At the heart of Blood Brothers, as well as the twins themselves, is the mother Mrs Johnstone. When she realises she is pregnant with twins and cannot afford to keep them both, she agrees to a deal with her employer Mrs Lyons to let her keep one of the twins. The show then goes on to tell the story of the twins from being young children to their deaths on the self same day (and that is no spoiler).  As they grow up, you see them meet as young children, against their paranoid mother's will, as well as see how different their upbringings were; one was more fortunate, went off to university and became a councilor; the other grew up in a poorer area of Liverpool and comes to lose his job in the pre-Thatcher depression.

Headlining the cast were Marti Pellow as the Narrator and Maureen Nolan as Mrs Johnstone. She was fantastic and you couldn't help but fall in love with her Mrs Johnstone. She was funny, sweet and moving, and her rendition of Tell Me It's Not True (which is the big number in the show), moved the entire audience to a standing ovation. Marti Pellow was good with what he had as the Narrator, being the threatening little voice inside both Mrs Johnstone's and Mrs Lyons' heads. It's quite a passive role though, commenting on the event happening round him rather than having an active role in the plot. I've seen Pellow before as Che in Evita which is a fairly similar role, so I'd like to see him some day in a more active role.

One person I HAVE to mention is Sean Jones, who played Mickey, the twin who Mrs Johnstone kept. WOW!!!! I was so convinced when he first came on stage that he was playing a 7 year old kid (they don't use child actors), and then a 20 something year old near the end of it. In a way, it was insane!! I've never seen anything like it, and it has to be seen to be believed. Out of the rest of the cast, Joel Benedict's Eddie, Danielle Carlass' Linda (Mickey and Eddie's childhood friend and the girl who they both fall in love with) and Kate Jarman's paranoid Mrs Lyons were the other stand outs for me.

I don't have much else to say about Blood Brothers other than it will make you laugh - the jokes were hilarious, especially Eddie putting the swear words he learnt from Mickey to good use in front of his mother (!!) - and it will make you uneasy and certainly close to crying - you sometimes forget when Mickey and Eddie are together that by the end of the show, they're both going to die..... For me, it's like War Horse; it's incredibly powerful and moving, and something you should definitely see once during your lifetime.