Catch Me If You Can by Jack Weinstock & Willie Gilbert – 28th March 2022 – Theatr Clwyd

As a kid growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, I can’t say I watched that much TV. In fact, I don’t think we got a colour TV until the end of the 80’s. I think I was the only child in school not to know what colour Posh Paws was on The Multi-coloured Swap Shop, and who understood what Ted Lowe meant when he uttered his immortal phrase about “the pink is next to the green” on a live snooker commentary.  

Whilst I’d hear all the hoo ha about Dallas and Dynasty in the school playground (and of course that major news story, who shot JR Ewing) I never watched either show; as a family we didn’t watch soap operas, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t intrigued to watch TV legends Patrick Duffy, Bobby Ewing in Dallas, and Linda Purl, Homeland, if they were appearing on a stage near me!

Now, before we start with the review, let’s make something clear, this Catch Me If You Can is NOT a stage production of the 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio film, this is a very different beast of a story! The play is based on a French play, Trap for a Lonely Man, by Robert Thomas, however, this adaptation written by Jack Weinstock & Willie Gilbert is a thriller which made its debut on Broadway in 1965.

Newly married Daniel Corban (Patrick Duffy) is at a remote lodge in the Catskill mountains; his wife has been missing for a few days, and the local police believe it is nothing more than a lover’s tiff. The cleric, Father Kelleher, visits Corban with the welcome news that Elizabeth has been found and reunites the couple. The only fly in the ointment is that Daniel is insistent that this woman is not his wife Elizabeth, whilst she is equally insistent that she is…and so opens this intriguing thriller in which a baffling train of events in which no-one is who they appear to be and nothing is what it seems to be.

Washington Irving’s - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Phillip Meeks – 8th March 2022 – name of theatre

I love, love, love the comic book effect programme for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but that’s pretty much where my love for this production began to run out.

“Don’t pass by. Stay forever.” Beseeches the sign outside of Sleepy Hollow, but this is not a place you are likely to linger. The show is loosely adapted from Washington Irving’s short story, and unlike Tim Burton’s film starring Johnny Depp, it remains true to the original in that it follows the arrival of schoolmaster Ichabod Crane (Sam Jackson) to the superstitious hamlet of Sleepy Hollow.

The Headless Horseman represents a past that never dies, but always haunts the living.

Journalist and biographer Washington Irving, born in 1783, created arguably the earliest of the American-made horror creatures…The Headless Horseman. Ichabod Crane, a young man from the city of Boston, arrives in the backwater of Sleepy Hollow to open a school, but in reality he has a darker motive for coming to this small hamlet. Irving was obsessed with early American history, the folklore surrounding the Headless Horseman maintained that the Horseman was a Hessian trooper during the American Revoltunary War and killed during the battle of White Plains in 1776. The legend stated that he lost his head by an American cannonball, and whilst his body was collected, his shattered head remained on the battlefield. He was buried in the cemetery at Sleepy Hollow from where he was said to rise as a malevolent ghost, seeking his head, or a replacement from someone else.