Lady Gaga proves she’s a truly world-class act after two sold-out nights at the Co-op Live Manchester, as if we needed any reminding.
The city of Manchester has been flooded with harness-wearing, mesh-sporting little monsters over the past two days.
And that’s because the absolute icon that is Lady Gaga brought her ‘Mayhem Ball’ to the Co-op Live for two nights.
I don’t think you’ll find anyone who doesn’t know who this fabulous woman is. Over the past decade, she’s won an Oscar, headlined the Super Bowl, performed in blockbusters alongside Al Pacino, no less, and her songs are literally ingrained into our minds.
It’s been a whole 11 years (yes, really) since she performed in Manchester, and it’s safe to say she was back with a bang.
ADVERTISEMENT
The performance was split up into five distinct acts, and each one was as exhausting and exhilarating as the next.
She begins the show by bopping out of a comically huge red dress, but this staging was only the start of what madness was about to ensue.
ADVERTISEMENT
Luckily, we’d been prepared by the other half of the Audio North team, who had the equal privilege of seeing her on night one and were left similarly speechless.
Throughout the 30-song epic, we had crutches, sand pits, cages, skeletons, enough wigs to produce an amateur production of Annie, and we didn’t question any of it. Why would we? It’s Lady Gaga.
Kicking things off with ‘Bloody Mary’, the two and a half hour marathon didn’t leave any stones unturned.
ADVERTISEMENT
We had all the bangers, from ‘Just Dance’ and ‘Paparazzi’ to ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Applause’, it had us wondering why any other superstar even bothers putting a song out these days.
Pop is in a good place at the moment with the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and so on, but you can make a strong case for Gaga having helped pave the way for every lady in the business ever since.
Gaga truly had us in the palm of her hands (or claws at one point), even more so when she left the stage to de-robe and show her more vulnerable side for the last two songs – beanie firmly on.
It wasn’t just a concert: this was a fully-fledged tour de force of talent that Manchester won’t forget any time soon.
Sometimes there’s no point in intellectualising why someone has that ‘X-factor’; sometimes you just have to take a step back and say WOW.
Funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the 14 national museums of the UK are all located in England – including the Imperial War Museum North, and the Science and Industry Museum in our region – and free entry to was first introduced all the way back in 2001, with millions of visitors having benefitted since.
National museums are said to add more than £1 billion a year to the economy, and bring in visitors from all over the world.
In fact, seven of the UK’s 10 most visited museums are national museums, and 7.1 million people visited the Natural History Museum and 6.4 million visited the British Museum in 2025 alone.
The Government has announced that all national museums in the UK will remain free for everyone to visit / Credit: Science Museum Group | Wikimedia Commons
Earlier this year though, the Government committed to working with local leaders and the museum and tourism sectors to explore whether charging overseas visitors could help museums’ finances.
But following this, it’s now believed that charging could deter visitors, and that the impacts and benefits would ‘not be felt equally’ across the sector.
Instead, the free entry will be funded by the £1.5 billion Arts Everywhere Fund – which is providing £760 million for museums – while £600 million of infrastructure funding is supporting national museums and DCMS-sponsored cultural organisations.
The latter funding will be used to address critical maintenance and works to estates, and enable institutions to deliver on their commitments to share collections with visitors from around the world.
A further £160 million is coming from The Museum Estates and Development Fund to help museums tackle maintenance backlogs.
On top of that, the Government will work with Arts Council to develop a long-term strategic plan for the future of museums.
Featured Image – Science Museum Group
Art & Culture
Dirty Dancing at Palace Theatre, Manchester – at least one audience member had the time of her life…
Daisy Jackson
For anyone who has watched Dirty Dancing so many times they can practically recite the dialogue, taking on the Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey roles is no small feat – and turning that lakeside romance into a live musical comes with even bigger expectations.
The stage production at the Palace Theatre in Manchester has all the familiar ingredients: the dancing, the music, the forbidden romance and, of course, that lift. But while there are moments when the theatre version captures the exuberance of the original, it doesn’t always manage to recreate its magic.
Charlie Varlet as Baby does a great job of embracing the knock-kneed awkwardness of the teenage star, slowly blossoming into a beautiful dancer who is almost eerily similar to the film’s Jennifer Grey.
And Joel Benjamin plays a striking Johnny, moving lightly for such an enormously muscular actor.
But there are moments where their chemistry fizzles out, too much of the script that focuses on their bickerings and misunderstandings to make you buy into their love story.
At points, it feels almost slapstick, and the result is a restless audience that keeps hooting and hollering at a topless Benjamin when he’s trying to deliver a serious monologue about Johnny’s upbringing. One woman shouts ‘LUCKY YOU’ and cackles as Baby sits in bed with him. It’s not a Magic Mike show, guys.
Where Dirty Dancing the musical shines is when it really makes the most of its full ensemble, with huge dance numbers that see limbs and skirts flying right across the stage.
Ellie Ferguson as Penny in Dirty Dancing. Credit: Danny Kaan
And it’s hard to take your eyes off Penny (Ellie Fergusson), even when she’s lurking in the crowd, so impressive is her stage presence and the execution of her dance routines.
Having a lot of the musicians on the stage is a fantastic touch too – you spot people playing saxophones and clarinets and guitars in a lot of the scenes and it adds a real party atmosphere.
The set design does its best to replicate the iconic moments of the film, but the cast shaking themselves dry under a blue light can’t come close to the magic of the lake scene.
If you’ve watched the film so often you can recite it word for word (guilty), you won’t find a lot of surprises up on the stage – the theatre adaptation sticks pretty tightly to the original plot and script.
Baby (Charlie Varlet) and Johnny (Joel Benjamin)Dirty Dancing is at the Palace Theatre in ManchesterCredit: Danny Kaan
It means that a lot of the moments that would translate best to stage – the underground dance party in the staff quarters, the montage of Baby learning to dance, the Hungry Eyes scene – are condensed into the first half of the musical.
The second half feels a little flat in comparison, just a lot of bickering and storming around the stage… up until that grand finale, when Johnny bursts from the back of the theatre and storms the stage to complete that iconic lift.
It’s worth all the trundle just for that final euphoric moment.
Dirty Dancing is at the Palace Theatre in Manchester until Saturday 3 October, then will return next summer. You can grab tickets HERE.
Clementine Hall -
9th October 2025 
