Regional Tours…

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

We believe that the future of theatre in UK depends on a vibrant successful regional infrastructure where audiences, writers, directors, young performers can learn and develop their passion and commitment to the Arts.

We have called for the establishment of a network of regionally important organisations who collaborate to deliver good quality theatre that engages their local communities and drives the social cultural and economic benefits for their population. These venues need a strong product flow to attract audiences, drive income and allow them to cross subsidise other valuable outreach and development work. Touring productions that are willing to work with these venues, especially the mid-scale sized ones is vital as not every venue is capable of programming their venue from their own resources.

It was interesting to see the announcement of the Regional Independent Theatre Alliance (RITA), an alliance of five (so far) regional theatres to make the case for a third way of operating regional venues, mission driven, financially self-reliant and growth engines. We think this a very important concept and support the RITA aims. The founding members are Birmingham Hippodrome, Leeds Heritage Theatres, Marlowe Theatre Canterbury, Theatre Royal Newcastle, and Norwich Theatre Royal. They call for recognition of the economic value they deliver, the collection and sharing of data to support their argument and a national co-investment strategy. They request the support of the Department of Media and Culture and Arts Council England. They represent 8,000 theatre seats, 2.6million attendance and more than £80million in gross income with a projected economic impact of £781million over five years. We applaud the initiative and look forward to seeing them educating RITA.

Regional Tours

We see a lot of regional theatre (more than the West End these days) as the ease of travel and cost of tickets and local dining feels better value. But there is a two-tier system. The large No 1 touring venues seem to be thriving on a diet of touring musicals meeting the need of audiences for a feel good night out, while the smaller venues (under 600 seats) struggle to programme as they can’t meet the touring producers financial demands for guarantee or high-level splits on the Box Office, or simply accommodating the bigger musicals on their stages. Yet these venues are where many audiences and potential performers get their first experience of live theatre and we need them to survive and thrive. Performers, especially star names, are reluctant to sign up for a year long tour, living in digs, and traveling to a different city each Sunday or Monday. It is an exhausting schedule and yet economically, producers need to book in venues far enough apart to not affect demand in back-to-back weeks. TTR and, for a lucky few, the Arts Council loan scheme do help mitigate the risk of the tour length and booking venues that have a less well-developed audience base but at the same time, they recoup capitalisation with more certainty and may persuade some touring producers to shorten the tour length and omit marginal venues where there is a risk of not covering the weekly running costs.

Looking ahead to the second half of 2026 and into 2027, there is a good offering of regional touring musicals but a less wide-ranging offer of touring plays.

Musicals

These fifteen tours are all worth seeing as they travel around the country:

Barnum continues its tour through to Malvern on 31 October. This fabulous actor-musician musical offers an uplifting joyous night at the circus. This is a very fine production, retaining a sense of the original Watermill production as the Calamity Jane tour did last year but opening it up to a bigger stage and larger audiences with a joyful spectacle and an emotional heart. It allows the excellent Coleman songs to delight and the multi-talented cast to shine, reminding us that we all need a bit of love, luck and humbug to thrive.

Legally Blonde continues through to Theatre Royal Brighton on 2 January 2027. Amber Davies is certainly part of the draw after her successes on Love Island (2017), 9 to 5 (2019), Back to the Future (2022), Pretty Woman (2023), The Great Gatsby (2025) and of course, Strictly Come Dancing (2025). It’s quite a pedigree and the diminutive young actress can hold her own in the singing and dancing and certainly looks the part. Of course, we all cheer and whoop when she finally nails the case by demonstrating that you don’t have a shower after a perm and that Carlos is gay AND European! However, it is Sprout, the cute little dog playing Bruiser, who steals most of her scenes, perfectly trained to sit still (peering offstage at its handler) or jumping up to get treats on stage. It delivers plenty of cute “Aah” moments!

The Operation Mincemeat tour continues until Crawley Hawth on 28 November. Operation Mincemeat was an audacious, bold, and cunning plan to deceive the Nazi’s in World War II as to where the Allies planned to land to retake Southern Europe in 1943. SplitLip developed this historical true story into a spoof musical in 2019, finally reaching the Fortune Theatre in the West End in 2023. There is no denying the acclaim that the show has garnered from such humble beginnings, nor the energy that the cast of five throw at the show which earned a standing ovation at the end, but it is a quirky show and claims 88 five-star reviews.

Photo credit: Matt Crockett

The Bodyguard tour runs through to Canterbury Marlowe Theatre in August before heading off to Istanbul. The Bodyguard is a 2012 stage musical with a book by Alexander Dinelaris, based on the 1992 film of the same name, with the score featuring songs recorded by Whitney Houston including ‘One Moment in Time’ and ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’.

The Ballad of Jonny and June was at Bradford Alhambra, and the tour continues to Leeds on 19 September. The Ballad of Johnny and June is a jukebox musical that lives up to its title. Told through the eyes of their son, John Carter Cash (born 1970), it is a linear retelling of their life together through acted scenes and the music they created. It spares no blushes in the retelling of his turbulent lifestyle accompanied by the often-mournful sounding rockabilly blues songs. The Ballad takes us through the Johnny Cash hit songs such as ‘I Walk the Line’ (1957), ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ (1958), ‘Ring of Fire’ (1963) with its Mariachi horns, ‘Jackson’ (1967), ‘A Boy named Sue’ (1969), ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ (1996), and ‘Hurt’ (2002).

The Jersey Boys’ latest tour started at Nottingham Concert Hall on 30 June and will run through Dartford Orchard on 14 August 2028. Sometimes you just want to go to the theatre and say “oh, what a night”. It may be over 60 years since 1963, but Jersey Boys certainly gives them that feel and sends audiences humming the very tune. The 1976 Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons hit is an upbeat dance tune and is one of many songs featured in the documentary style jukebox musical. Indeed, once the band renames itself, in 1960, as the Four Seasons, after a bowling alley sign, the show takes off with the hits weaved into the narrative.

Just for One Day continues through to the Mayflower Southampton on 2 October 2027. July 13th,1985 was a memorable day, Live Aid in Wembley Stadium, one of the greatest ever concerts and also a game changer in celebrity fund raising for global causes and more importantly, driving awareness of the underlying causes and issues into a nation’s psyche. Pouring money into a famine crisis is only ever a Band Aid sticking plaster but the concerts and records each side of the Atlantic drove the issues into global minds in a lasting way, long after the initial horrific news reports of famine that were the catalyst had faded in the memory. It was a brilliant idea to tell the story of the events as the 40th anniversary approached and to remind a new generation that the trust that the concerts spawned continues to drive awareness with the same band of volunteer trustees.

Matilda continues until Cardiff’s Millennium Centre on 17 January 2027. Matilda is a musical with lyrics by Tim Minchin and a book by Dennis Kelly. It is based on the 1988 novel of the same name by Roald Dahl. The musical's story centres on Matilda Wormwood, a precocious five-year-old girl with the gift of telekinesis, who loves reading, overcomes obstacles caused by her family and school, and helps her teacher to reclaim her life.

Burlesque was due to begin its regional tour at Woking Theatre on 25 July, but this was cancelled at short notice, and the tour begins now in Sunderland on 6 August and continues through to Leeds on 10 July 2027. The musical's story centres on Ali Rose, an aspiring singer, who leaves her small hometown for New York in search for her mother; she becomes a dancer at a burlesque club. The advance sales are reportedly strong, so we hope there are no further problems getting the show on the road.

High Society with Helen George left the Barbican in London to start a regional tour at Wycombe Swan on 16 July, running through to Dartford’s Orchard Theatre on 21 November. Based on the 1956 film starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra, the show centres on socialite Tracy Samantha Lord preparing for her second marriage to humourless accountant George Kittredge when her first husband Dexter Haven turns up to muddy the waters and her feelings. Her mother disapproves and scathingly says of the marriage: “we all make mistakes, some of them are unhappy ones” and her Tracy’s younger sister Dinah is determined to try and stop the marriage. It sets up some lovely comic interplay between the main characters.

However, it is the score that dominates and makes the evening. With ‘High Society’, ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’, ‘True Love’, ‘You’re Sensational’, and ‘Well, Did You Evah?’ being retained from the film, and with ‘Be a Clown’ (from the 1948 film The Pirate), ‘Let’s Misbehave’ (written in 1927 by Porter), ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ (written in 1936 for Born to Dance), ‘Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love’ (written in 1928 for his musical Paris), and ‘I Love Paris’ (1953 song included in the musical Can-Can) added for the stage show, it is wonderful jukebox musical of Porter’s charming romantic and comical works strung slickly together by Arthur Kopit’s book.

Photo credit: Paul Coltas

Mean Girls continues to Newcastle Theatre Royal on 30 January 2027. It is a chance to once again enjoy this cautionary tale of female teenage angst in an Illinois High School with a large high energy youthful ensemble to fill the stage for the big numbers in Tommy Wade-Smith’s choreography, with some fun fast paced movement sequences using the canteen and classroom tables. The narrative is quite simple and focuses on the female characters. Cady Heron has relocated from a home-schooled life in Kenya to North Shore High School in Illinois and is desperate to fit in. She dumbs her self down in the maths class to appeal to the fittest boy in the class, Aaron, and is desperate to be liked by dominant school girl Regina and her acolytes. The message is straightforward as Cady herself notes, I was so “eager for people to like me that I lost myself in the process”.

Mrs Doubtfire starts its regional tour at Birmingham Hippodrome on 13 August and continues through Canterbury’s Marlowe Theatre on 15 August 2027. Out-of-work actor Daniel will do anything for his kids. After losing custody in a messy divorce, he creates the alter ego of Scottish nanny Mrs Doubtfire in a desperate attempt to stay in their lives. As his new character takes on a life of its own, Mrs. Doubtfire teaches Daniel more than he bargained for about how to be a father.

Blood Brothers goes out again around the country from 8 September, opening at The Playhouse in Weston Super-Mare, and continuing on til Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury on 22 May 2027. Blood Brothers, written by Willy Russell in the early 1980’s and produced and directed by the late Bill Kenwright, surpassed 10,000 performances in its West End run from 1988 to 2012. Whether you have seen it before or not, it is well worth a visit as even though we know the story (which in any case is foretold in the opening prologue narration), it still grabs you emotionally as it unfolds and is full of wonderfully comic moments, sending you home with an earworm of a tune to remind you of those feelings.

Cats begins its tour at Theatre Royal Plymouth on 6 October and continues to Newcastle’s Theatre Royal on 19 June 2027. Cats is a sung-through musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber that hardly needs any introduction. It is based on the 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make the "Jellicle choice" by deciding which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. A musical with nine lives.

Back to the Future starts its tour at Bristol Hippodrome on 8 October and runs through to Cardiff’s Millennium Centre on 13 November 2027. This is a show enjoyed at every visit with so many little details to look out for like the Tardis spinning across the back cloth or references to the celebrated features of 1955 such as fossil fuel, cigarettes, asbestos, and spam (what a difference the passage of time makes!) The original creative team have pulled off a marvellous trick, honouring their great film franchise, but reinventing it as a stage show to delight 21st century audiences. It is a perfect feel good show for post-pandemic times that puts a smile on your face and a spring in your step as you are thoroughly entertained by a fine cast and wonderful staging, being taken “back in time” and shown “the power of love”.

Plays

In the same period, we see plays on tour around half as much as musicals and it is also noticeable that the venue mix is different. These are generally much cheaper to tour with no band and smaller casts and while they play well in smaller venues, they struggle in the larger venues over 100 seats unless they have a strong headline cast or an established brand like the Agatha Christie plays.

Our Man in Havana opened at Theatre Royal Windsor on 1 July and tours until Arts Theatre Cambridge on 5 September. Adapted by Clive Francis from Graham Greene’s novel, it follows the hilarious exploits of James Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Havana, Cuba.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith

The Last Laugh continues its brilliantly funny tour until Tunbridge Wells on 24 October. For a certain generation, Eric Morecambe (1926-1984), Bob Monkhouse (1928-2003) and Tommy Cooper (1921-1984) were the very best of British comedians throughout the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. This affectionate and fascinating play, written and directed by Paul Hendy, is a fitting tribute to these wonderful legendary performers and masters of the comic art. His brilliant script explores what made the comedy work and the differences between their approaches.

Dial M for Murder continues to Peterborough’s New Theatre on 3 October. Dial M for Murder was a 1954 American crime thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted into a play. Tony Wendice, a retired English professional tennis player, is married to wealthy socialite Margot, who has been having an affair with Mark Halliday, an American crime-fiction writer. A murder is plotted.

The Silence of the Lambs opened at the Leicester Curve on 1 August and continues to tour until Sunderland Empire on 26 June 2027. Come face to face with the chilling cultural phenomenon The Silence of the Lambs as it makes its world stage-play premiere in 2026. Based on Thomas Harris’ gripping literary masterpiece, actor John Partridge plays Hannibal Lecter, providing audiences a chance to see this psychological thriller in their local theatre.

Paranormal Activity starts at Richmond on 7 September and tours until Leicester Curve on 12 June 2027. James and Lou have left Chicago behind for a fresh start in London and a chance to forget the darkness that once haunted them. But as night falls, strange sounds echo through the house, objects move on their own, and the couple’s sleep is shattered by a growing sense of dread. Determined to uncover the truth, James sets up cameras to document the unexplained. What begins as a simple experiment soon spirals into a chilling descent into obsession, fear, and the unknown. As the line between reality and nightmare blurs, the couple discovers a horrifying truth: places aren’t haunted - people are.

The Haunting of Hill House starts at Salisbury Playhouse on 11 September and tours until Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre on 14 November. When a group of daring investigators take on the mystery of Hill House, curiosity quickly descends into fear. Experiments plunge into darkness. Strange disturbances ripple through twisting corridors. As the house tightens its grip, it will leave you on the edge of your seat… and sleeping with the lights on long after the curtain falls.

The Hollow opens at Canterbury Marlowe Theatre on 9 October and continues to Glasgow Theatre Royal on 29 May 2027. Another stage adaptation from the books of Agatha Christie, although this one was done by Christie herself in 1951. Given the success of Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then there Were None by the same creative team, expect more twists and turns as the mystery unfolds.

Thank goodness for The Last Laugh as thrills and scares seems to be the overriding theme of these tours. Hope its not as scary for the producers backing the shows! While London offers classics such as Arcadia, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Cherry Orchard or new plays like Springwood, The Truth and The Standard of Living, the regional touring offer seems much safer. Is this a true reflection of the great divide in audiences between regional venues and those who can afford London prices? Why don’t classic play revivals work as well as the thrillers and comedies ?

If you only go to the theatre a few times a year outside the pantomime, there is enough here to satisfy you on a good night out but there remains a sense that we need to develop more midscale musicals and some classical plays to really support the programming at the smaller regional venues.

Nick Wayne

Nick has been involved as a Trustee/Director in UK Producer and Venue Organisations for twenty-six years, seen over 1350 productions, visited over 160 of the UK Venues, seen overseas productions in USA, Canada, France, Hungary, Austria, Czech Republic, and Australia  and invested in over 40 West End Productions. You can read his long form articles on Stage Whispers UK - Nick Wayne