JUST back from a holiday in New York, one of Spectator’s colleagues reports being highly pleased at seeing a name familiar to North Yorkshire audiences among the credits on Broadway.

Not only that, but she was also highly entertained by The 39 Steps, which she missed when it was staged by North Country Theatre.

Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of the show, based on an original script by North Country Theatre director Nobby Dimon and Simon Corble, won a Laurence Olivier Best New Comedy Award in 2007, and is now at the Cort Theatre, just off Times Square.

A large overhead poster outside the theatre informs those in the queue/line of the script’s provenance.

After curtain up, it was highly satisfying to see a full house of NY sophisticates thoroughly relishing the John Buchan drama of derring- do, presented with minimal props by a cast of just four English actors playing multiple parts amid much inventive visual humour – surely straight out of the Dimon stable.

It was, mind, a rather more comfortable experience than Richmond Castle in the rain.

Frank’s done it

COUN Simon Henig, the Labour leader of Durham County Council, has called for a “people’s museum”

to be established.

“A people’s museum could link up with and complement existing provision to fill in the gaps and provide a more rounded picture of life in County Durham. It would capture the tangible essence of the ordinary and extraordinary strands of life which collectively make up the rich fabric of County Durham, past and present,” he says, in a passage worthy of Pseud’s Coener in Private Eye.

Coun Henig said the people’s museum could focus on the county’s mining past, its amateur sporting traditions, its music, its traditional crafts, hobbies and music, its famous sons and daughters and its ordinary men and womenfolk.

All very laudable, but has he never been to Beamish Open Air Museum?

Frank Atkinson’s magnificent idea – to celebrate the ordinary life of people in past generations – may be a bit taken for granted now, but almost everything Coun Henig calls for – and much more – is already at Beamish.

They told you so

THE Government has, we are told, injected £12.5m to ease problems caused by a lack of primary school places in Darlington.

Part of the money will be spent at Alderman Leach School on the new West Park estate.

Investment in education is, of course, welcome – but the new Alderman Leach only opened in 2005, and was smaller than the school it replaced. There were warnings at the time about the size being a false economy, especially with hundreds of homes being built at West Park.

Now, it seems, the doubters were right (they usually are when it comes to spending public money).

And the new school, and its staff and pupils, will see disruption while the changes are made.

Whatever happened to planning?