Stage: Nando Messias: The Sissy’s Progress

Brighton Fringe is the place to find the new, the exciting and the challenging, and perhaps no more so than within the Pink Fringe. This year sees a performance by Nando Messias called The Sissy’s Progress. Nando Messias was beaten up on the street behind Toynbee Studios in an act of homophobic hatred. After years of dreaming up his response, he presents The Sissy’s Progress, a spectacle of provocation, celebration and hyper flamboyance.
Part dance-theatre, part walking performance, The Sissy’s Progress leads its audience out onto the streets with a live marching band playing original music composed by Jordan Hunt. The Sissy’s Progress confronts the harsh contradictions of gender and violence of city life, standing up for sissies everywhere.
Messias is heading onto the streets with musical director Hunt and five musicians to share his work with audiences and passers-by across the UK. Instruments include the cornet, saxophone, trombone, tuba and snare drum.
Nando says: “It’s genuinely frightening. I almost always get abuse from passers-by when we’re doing the performance. The audience gets to experience that and that makes it feel uniquely relevant. I’m particularly proud that we take this performance precisely to places where such work wouldn’t normally be seen. It’s a universal theme.”
The Sissy’s Progress
7 May, Marlborough Theatre, Brighton, www.marlboroughtheatre.org.uk

Little Prince
Hove schoolboy Ronan Powell will this summer take on the role of a lifetime after winning the title role in a new musical adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, premiering at Brighton Open Air Theatre from 20–22 May. Spanish theatre company The Amateurs spent nearly a week auditioning for the leading role at Brighton and Hove High School but knew they had found their Prince in Ronan, nine, a Year Five pupil at Stanford Junior School, Stanford Road, Brighton.
Ronan, who is half-British and half-South African, takes acting, singing and dancing lessons at The Theatre Workshop (based at Brighton and Hove High School) and hopes to become a professional actor in the future. The Little Prince will be his first professional role and will see him performing for nearly an hour and a half and singing eight of the show’s ten songs.
A Little Prince, Brighton Open Air Theatre,
20–22 May, times vary, £8 / £5 concessions / £22 family. www.brightonopenairtheatre.co.uk