Play reveals a unique life with The Beatles
After wowing audiences at Edinburgh Festival Fringe and King’s Head Theatre, London in 2015, where one of the audience was Neil Aspinall’s widow Suzi, Davide Verazzini’s charming play A Life With The Beatles is to be staged at various venues as part of a 15-performance Scotland-wide tour in February and March, including The Catstrand in New Galloway on February 21.
Told from the unique perspective of Neil Aspinall, the only one who was always by their side and who knew everyone and everything. Yet where thousands of books have been written by people who never even met The Beatles, Neil’s steadfast loyalty meant he took his secrets to his grave when he died in 2008.
A Life With The Beatles recounts the era from him first joining The Beatles in 1961 as their driver to when he eventually stepped down as CEO of their corporate conglomerate, Apple Corps 46 years later. Veteran Glasgow-based actor Ian Sexon is effervescent in this energetic and intimate solo drama as he depicts the progression of the band from initial formation to the period after Epstein’s death, along the way jumping into the characters of John, Paul, George and Ringo, manager Brian Epstein and Producer George Martin.
2017 is also the 50th anniversary of the release of the groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a focal point of the play. Some 10 years before the album was made, an Edinburgh bus driver had so enjoyed listening to a young John Lennon playing harmonica during a journey on his bus, he presented him with a top-of-the-range harmonica that had (fortuitously) been left on his bus the previous day. Legend has it this was the one played on ‘Love Me Do’.
Source: The Galloway Gazette
