Calendar Girls

by Tim Firth
directed by Penny Nash
Thurs.-Sat., June 2-18, 8:00 p.m.
The Davies Foundation Auditorium
52 Church St., Kingston, ON

Left to right: Michelle Freedman, Valerie Winslow, Rachel Kelleher, Renée O'Farrell, Hayley Hudson, Heather Robinson-Dooreleyers, Angie Roberts, Dylan Chenier, Naomi Greer-Ballance, Lorna Jodoin.

Chris and Annie are middle-aged friends and members of the Women's Institute in their Yorkshire town. Though they spend lots of time at the Institute, they find it a bit stuffy.

When Annie's husband John dies of leukemia, Chris comes up with the idea of providing the local hospital with a new sofa for its visitors' room. She wants the Women's Institute to raise the money, but last year's calendar, featuring pictures of local bridges, raised less than a hundred pounds and the sofa will cost about 10 times that.

So Annie and Chris come up with an idea for a different sort of calendar—one featuring

Naomi Greer-Ballance and Bill Morrow.

tasteful nude photographs of Women's Insitute members. Needless to say, not all the members are sold on the idea.

Chris and Annie need to persuade 10 women besides themselves to pose for the calendar, and find a photographer they can all feel comfortable with. If they can do that, will the calendar sell?

Calendar Girls first appeared as a film, for which Tim Firth wrote the screenplay, in 2003. The play, adapted by Firth from the film, opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre in September 2008 and broke the all-time British box-office record during its 2008/09 tour, then continued to sell out in the West End, where it opened at the Noel Coward Theatre in April 2009. In 2010, the hit comedy embarked on a UK country-wide tour, one of the largest ever for a play. Calendar Girls is also a success across the globe.

Calendar Girls is based on a true story. In 1998 John Richard Baker died from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. During his illness his wife Angela Baker began raising money to donate a sofa to the local hospital where he was treated. Since then her group has raised more than three million pounds for leukemia and lymphoma research.

Tim Firth

Tim Firth was born in Merseyside, England in 1964. He spent most of his school years writing songs, and shortly before he finished school a course run by playwright Willy Russell inspired him to become a writer.

On leaving Cambridge University, he was invited to meet Alan Ayckbourn in Scarborough and commissioned to write a one-act play, Man Of Letters, for the Studio Theatre at Stephen Joseph Theatre. Its success led Ayckbourn to commission a full-length play, Neville's Island, which later transferred to the West End.

During two successive Christmas runs, the stage version of Firth's play The Flint Street Nativity became the most successful production in the history of the Liverpool Playhouse.

Firth has also released a solo album, Harmless Flirting.

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