Frank Skinner Tickets

Short Biography
Tickets are available now for Frank Skinner and Friends - a night of comedy, cabaret and music all on one bill in London's West End and brought to you by multi-award winning comedian FRANK SKINNER. 

Each night will feature four different acts. Expect everything from top comedy to swing bands, beatboxing, opera, juggling, and even a little bit of magic, all compered by host FRANK SKINNER. Confirmed acts for Frank Skinner and Friends include everyone from comedians AL MURRAY - THE PUB LANDLORD, RICHARD HERRING, ROISIN CONATY (Best Newcomer, Edinburgh Festival), BRENDON BURNS (Edinburgh Comedy Award winner), CARL DONNELLY, ISY SUTTIE, NICK HELM (nominated this year for the Edi...

Short Biography
Tickets are available now for Frank Skinner and Friends - a night of comedy, cabaret and music all on one bill in London's West End and brought to you by multi-award winning comedian FRANK SKINNER. 

Each night will feature four different acts. Expect everything from top comedy to swing bands, beatboxing, opera, juggling, and even a little bit of magic, all compered by host FRANK SKINNER. Confirmed acts for Frank Skinner and Friends include everyone from comedians AL MURRAY - THE PUB LANDLORD, RICHARD HERRING, ROISIN CONATY (Best Newcomer, Edinburgh Festival), BRENDON BURNS (Edinburgh Comedy Award winner), CARL DONNELLY, ISY SUTTIE, NICK HELM (nominated this year for the Edinburgh Comedy Award), ROB DEERING, TERRY ALDERTON, ANDY ZALTZMAN, PHIL NICHOL (Edinburgh Comedy Award winner), ALUN COCHRANE and TOM DEACON, to cabaret duo FRISKY & MANNISH, BEARDYMAN, THE MAGNETS and rapper DOC BROWN.

The limited two week run at London's Noel Coward Theatre starts on 23rd January 2012, and follows the triple-extended sell-out success; Frank Skinner's Credit Crunch Cabaret, which saw a variety of performances from a host of award-winning acts.

This show is guaranteed to sell-out quickly.  Book now to avoid disappointment.

What the press said about Frank Skinner's Credit Crunch Cabaret.
"Skinner is the ideal compere for this event: a comic everyman and a great ad-libber."
Brian Logan, The Guardian

Confirmed line-up:
Mon 23 Jan: James Acaster, Peter Firman, Jay Foreman, Carl Donnelly. 

Tue 24 Jan: Chris Ramsey, The Magnets, Nick Helm, Zoe Lyons. 

Wed 25 Jan: Alistair Green, Frisky and Mannish, Loretta Maine and Special Guest to be announced.

Thu 26 Jan: Joe Lycett, Jive Aces, Isy Suttie, Richard Herring. 

Fri 27 Jan: Tom Deacon, Bruce Airhead, The Sheeps, Roisin Conaty. 

Sat 28 Jan: Katherine Ryan, Camille O'Sullivan, Gareth Richards + Special Guest, to be announced.

Mon 30 Jan: Rob Rouse, Rob Deering, Carey Marx, Al Murray - The Pub Landlord.
Tue 31 Jan: Elis James, Beardyman, Phil Nichol, + Special Guest, to be announced.

Wed 1 Feb: Matt Forde, Doc Brown, Totally Tom, + Special Guest, to be announced. 

Thu 2 Feb: Daniel Simonsen, Tina C, WitTank, Brendon Burns. 

Fri 3 Feb: Jimmy McGhie, Mat Ricardo, Ali Crook, Alun Cochrane.

Sat 4 Feb: Jason Cook, Fitzrovia Radio Hour, Aaron Sparks, Andy Zaltzman.

In-depth Biography
Back in the 1970s, when film music first began to boom as an area of recording activity, one would have been hard put to find a mention of the name Frank Skinner much less any examples of his movie scores on record. Skinner, although a very important figure in the field of film music, had the misfortune to have done his work at Universal, one of the two "small" majors (along with Columbia Pictures, mainly on genre films that were less than the most prestigious of their era. And, like a lot of Universal composers of the period, much of his work was the subject of mixing and matching by the company's music department, so it was difficult to tell who had written precisely what, even within the scope of a single motion picture. Much has changed since. At the outset of the 21st century, orchestras have recorded and record companies have released multiple CDs of Frank Skinner's best and best-known scores for movies such as Son of Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, among others.

Skinner was born in Chicago and studied at the Chicago Musical College before becoming a vaudeville pianist, and he later joined a dance band and went to work for a music publisher. He was originally brought to Hollywood by MGM to arrange the music for The Great Ziegfeld, and he joined Universal in the late '30s where he remained for the next three decades. Although he never aspired to the kind of artistic explorations of Bernard Herrmann or Miklos Rozsa, Skinner used the studio's horror, science fiction, and fantasy films as a vehicle for experimentation and often got impressive results; certainly his music for Son of Frankenstein is among the classics of the horror genre and was good enough to be reused in numerous other features. Even when he didn't reuse that musical material directly, many of Skinner's best scores, such as Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, seemed to point back toward it. Watching the movie, it always seems that, at any moment (especially the tense ones), the music is about to break into a variation on the six-note theme that Skinner devised for Ygor's shepherd's horn (really an instrument called a blute) in Son of Frankenstein. Skinner was often teamed with Hans J. Salter, an expatriate European composer who joined Universal at the end of the 1930's, and the two often orchestrated each other's work, so it it is sometimes difficult to keep straight who wrote what between the two of them. This was one factor, along with the studio's policy of freely reusing thematic material from its vaults without credit, that prevented Skinner from getting his due public recognition for decades. Within the film music community, however, he was widely respected; he was the author of -Underscore (1950), the first manual ever written dealing with techniques of film scoring, and he lasted longer at the major studios than almost any other composer. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi