A new play inspired by the life of late TV presenter Paul O’Grady is set to tour the country next year.<\/p>\n
Savage, which takes its name from O’Grady’s drag alter-ego Lily Savage, will launch at Leicester’s Curve theatre in February before moving on to other cities including Liverpool, Salford and Birmingham.<\/p>\n
O’Grady rose to fame in the 1990s with his drag queen persona and went on to present BBC One game show Blankety Blank. He died in March 2023 aged 67.<\/p>\n
The play’s writer Jonathan Harvey, said: “It’s so sad he’s not here to see it, but hopefully this will be a fitting testament to everything he achieved, and a cracking night out full of humour and heart.”<\/p>\n
Starring former RuPaul’s Drag Race UK winner Danny Beard, the production is due to open at Leicester Curve on 13 February.<\/p>\n
Before his death, Birkenhead-born O’Grady was involved in its creation, which draws from his autobiographies to tell the story of how he developed the character of Lily.<\/p>\n
Speaking during the development of Savage before his death, O’Grady said: “I’m delighted Jonathan has agreed to write the script, I really am as he’s perfect for this and he’s such a great writer.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new play inspired by the life of late TV presenter Paul O’Grady is set to tour the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-641544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}