A small band of dedicated academics is attempting to ensure that important developments in British musical theatre don’t get lost to history.

Musical Theatre is an ephemeral form, performances take place around the country or in fringe venues and after the performance the scripts and scores, directorial and designer’s notes, sketches and photographs are thrown into the back of a cupboard, rarely to reappear. The Americans are much better at archiving their history in the wonderful Billy Rose Collection at the Lincoln Centre branch of New York Public Library, hence the relative ease of researching American Musical Theatre and the predominance of books and education about that history.

The British Musical Theatre Research Institute (which I chair), is leading the development of interactive links between creative teams and academics. Two recent publications about British Musical Theatre, British Musical Theatre Since 1950 (Gordon, Jubin and Taylor 2016) and The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical (Gordon and Jubin eds,) are in the vanguard of this process, providing a historical context on which future research can build. Palgrave’s book series Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre (edited by Taylor and Symonds) was launched with Gilbert and Sullivan’s Respectable Capers (Goron 2016), while monographs on Theatre Music at the RSC and National Identity in British Musicals of the early twentieth century will appear in the coming years.

The next stage is a plea to creative teams, to writers and composers, to document their working processes and to make scripts and scores, DVDs and stage management scripts available to researchers. Our musical theatre history should be recorded, as should the current upsurge in new writing with support at the Union, Southwark Playhouse, the Finborough and The Other Palace. Companies should consider archiving materials at the V&A’s theatre archives, or internally, and interacting with researchers in this important work. It has been said that history is written by the victors, and if a show reaches the West End it is certainly more likely to be recorded, but history is also written by the academics, the archivists and the educators. It is time to make sure the full story of British Musical Theatre is told – talk to the researchers and ensure your story is told.

Congratulations to the Artistic Director and Proprietor on the opening of The Other Palace – and what a brilliant choice for the inaugural production. The Wild Party (Michael John LaChiusa and George C.Wolfe) is a dark claustrophobic piece that demonstrates that musical theatre is a wonderfully complex form. It challenges audiences, proving that musical theatre can be political AND entertaining, confrontational AND moving, darkly tragic AND beautiful, and that the formal structures of musicals contribute to that diversity. What more exciting provocation could we hope for in the renamed venue, which, it is anticipated, will become the hub for trying out and refining new work in London.

The interactions between London and Broadway have been stimulating and productive for the whole of musical theatre’s history. This next step in bringing new and exciting work to London in small scale productions should challenge and provoke composers and writers to ever greater excellence, while educating audiences about the diversity of musical theatre. Of course, we will look forward to the inclusion of many more new British musicals in the months and years to come, but that doesn’t detract from the excitement I feel at the development of a dedicated home for new musicals. Southwark Playhouse, the Union, Menier Chocolate Factory, Charing Cross Theatre and others have been offering us exciting productions for some time now – and young British writers, composers and directors are starting to find routes to performance. This represents another step in that process, another link in the chain, another cog in the wheel and all the other metaphors you can think of. Writers need to be enabled and supported as they craft new work; beginning from workshops of snippets of material through rehearsed readings and stagings of excerpts through to full productions in a host of different sized and shaped venues, creative teams are finding opportunities. And seeing excellent and provocative productions, whether written by Americans or British teams, is part of the process of stimulating growth.

Well done to all involved with The Wild Party and to the team at The Other Palace for generating real excitement about the potential for experimenting in musical theatre.

Despite the constant gloom and doom in the news, the austerity in the economic forecasts and the long cold spell of winter weather British musical theatre is taking off again. London theatre contributed £623.6m to the economy in ticket sales in 2014, providing 167,000 creative jobs and a contribution to the economy of £856m in tourist spend – all these figures are up on previous years. [1]  And it’s not just the economy that benefits. Theatre-goers are 25% more likely to report that they feel in better than average health.[2] So if theatre and music can benefit the economy and benefit our health, why the gloom and doom? Just go to a musical!

For a little while now British musical theatre has been relatively quiet. We’ve been going to see the latest American blockbusters rather than celebrating the success of home grown productions like Made in Dagenham and Bend it Like Beckham, which spoke very clearly to a British audience. Gary Barlow’s first musical Finding Neverland opened at Leicester’s Curve Theatre and then went straight to Broadway though it is now expected to open in London this year. Was it the lack of infrastructure that led it to make a detour around the West End?

In the meantime, having opened in Leeds, Barlow and Tim Firth’s The Girls, based on Firth’s Calendar Girls, will arrive at The Phoenix in London next week. It tells a story about the fund-raising efforts of the WI in a small Yorkshire village, and as such its context may not seem likely to translate to Broadway or global success. It is a very British affair. But global success has been achieved with other very British musicals such as Matilda and Billy Elliott. And with the pedigree of its writers, creative team and performers, The Girls has the potential to spread its feel good message about what individuals can achieve when they work together around the world. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It hasn’t been quiet in the regions. It hasn’t been quiet in fringe venues. And the exciting thing is that now the infrastructure to support writers and new musicals is in place. There’s support for writers through Mercury Musicals and the Stiles and Drewe prize, Musical Theatre Network and the BEAM festival. There are any number of opportunities for workshopping new musicals in the Universities and Colleges, including at my own institution, the University of Winchester. And once developed there are theatres promoting musicals and new writing, while producers specialising in new British musicals are proliferating.

Get out to see The Girls if you can, but if you can’t make it to London, head to your local theatre and discover what new, up and coming writers are producing. After all, supporting musical theatre is not only fun and good for the economy, it’s good for you too!

[1] ‘The Contribution of the Arts and Culture to the Economy’. ACE.

[2] ‘The Value of Arts and Culture to People and Society’. ACE

Why oh why oh why…. do film directors insist on casting stars who can neither sing nor dance into roles that require both? At what point was the skill of Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers so under-estimated that directors think a film musical doesn’t even need effective, let alone spectacular, song and dance routines. It’s all very well for the stars to take some lessons and become competent at floating voices tunefully, but that doesn’t allow them to communicate effectively in song, and it doesn’t allow the music to lift scenes to an exciting climax. Songs become wafty, willowy, immaterial and somewhat irrelevant – the curse of the pleasant. And it’s okay for stars to deliver competent dance routines based around simple steps and combinations – they’re just not exciting or spectacular, and so the same applies.

Some film musicals, I must admit, have thin stories, and this is no exception. In the case of the classic Hollywood musicals the spectacular song and dance routines provide the excitement, replacing the complexity of narrative with a different type of excess; an excess of movement and energy, of sound and rhythm. Lalaland has neither complex plot nor spectacular song and dance routines (with the exception of the opening dance on the freeway). It looked beautiful but was ultimately a little bit dull. Why oh why oh why is it listed for so many awards?

As we approach the pantomime season again and remember how much we love to hate the hackneyed stories, the corny old jokes and the clichéd incorporation of popular songs, we might also notice how important and pervasive pantomime’s influence has been on musical theatre.

In the late nineteenth century pantomime was transformed by the incorporation of elements from music hall, extravaganza and burlesque into the progenitor of contemporary commercial pantomime. H.J. Byron wrote many influential pantomimes whose narratives are still played out each Christmas around the country – Buttons in Cinderella is one of his creations. Equally, the designs and transformation scenes developed at Drury Lane in the late Victorian period continue to inspire the illusion and magic that is still thrilling audiences across the West End.

The story is one of the most important factors that affects the pantomime box office; a story of good overcoming evil, a story that is already familiar and a story that involves gods and villains and a little bit of magic. Quest narratives are common, and, since nostalgia is another feature of pantomime, many of the regular pantomime stories can be traced back to folk tales or fairy tales adapted in the late nineteenth century into structures that are still repeated in our theatres each Christmas. Think of Cinderella and Aladdin, Dick Whittington and Jack and the Beanstalk.

But it is not just the story that is important. A particular style of self-deprecating comedy – in which comics promote the impression of a hopeless amateurism in slapstick scenes of enormous complexity, of Dames who fumble songs and dances, corpse and forget their lines, and side-kicks who can only win out with the help of the children in the audience – these are all features of a particular style of comedy that involves the audience in believing they could do it too. This is the myth of spontaneity – that anyone could do it. The audience becomes involved not just in the direct interactions with the stage, but in the perception that the comedians are as hapless as we all are in everyday life.

The combination of story-telling through physical action, stereotypical characters, coarse comedy and swift one-liners along with song and dance and a lack of realism, has been hugely influential in musical theatre too. So the next time you go to a British musical or a British pantomime, think about what’s behind them.

I loved the music the black comedy and the dark realism of The Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer. The presence of the voice of the author as a kind of narrator provided a useful distancing device, as did the nightmarish visions danced to the noisy grunge rock music. The performances were unstinting, the singing and dancing delivered with panache – and by halfway through I thought the show utterly brilliant. Characters were revealed in songs, some of which were beautiful, but then as the cancers spread around the stage there seemed nowhere new to go with the dark comedy and satire.

Shannon received the news that her unborn baby was clear of the genetic disease that was affecting her and had killed her mother, and she performed a beautifully executed but somewhat predictable tap dance of happiness. Others received less good news and the stories of real patients were overlaid on the speeches of performers. The frame began to collapse as the performers were pushed towards the audience by the growing cancer bean bags – and the author/narrator again intervened. This is where the performance lost me.

What had started as a black comic attack on the horror of cancer turned into a kind of therapy session incorporating voices and stories of victims and calling on the audience to become involved. Despite the characters commenting that one of the things not to do to cancer sufferers is to offer the ‘cancer face’ of sympathy the production moved into that territory in the final portion, remembering friends and family who had been lost to audience members. While I applaud the conviction of the performers, and can see that many audience members were genuinely moved, the moment the camp distance of black comedy and the nightmarish vision of a night on an NHS ward were left behind so was the potential to say something different and vital.

Although I had mixed feelings about this brave, flawed production I nonetheless applaud the National Theatre’s strategy of developing new approaches to musical theatre writing and look forward to many more such experiments.

The theatre was half empty last night when three quarters of the team from University of Winchester’s musical theatre programme (Matt Lockitt, Adam Rush and I) ventured all the way to the East End …

Source: Floyd Collins is awesome

The theatre was half empty last night when three quarters of the team from University of Winchester’s musical theatre programme (Matt Lockitt, Adam Rush and I) ventured all the way to the East End and Wilton’s Music Hall to see Floyd Collins.

After a brief prologue Floyd Collins is alone onstage for almost half an hour – and he, played by Ashley Robinson, is wonderful. The writing (by Tina Landau and Adam Guettel) allows him to express joy, excitement, wonder and hope, all supported by the most extraordinarily light, fluid and evocative music. We know that he is going to get stuck in an underground cavern and ultimately die there – that’s the story based on fact, and much as we might wish it there ain’t no other ending! But what the writers and performers achieved in the first act was the semblance of joy and hope in the presence of adversity. In the second half hope crumbles as reality surfaces and quarrels break out among the family and with the media and commercial circus that has arisen around the rescue attempts. Even in this more downbeat act every opportunity is taken to lift the emotions, to raise hope, to paint beautiful memories so that the audiences’ emotions are wrenched and screwed to the extremes. This production deals deftly with the detail of difficult relationships and the involvement of a fully engaged ensemble to bring this extraordinary work to full and glorious life. Well done Jonathan Butterell (director), Tom Brady (musical director) and all the company and crew. The show is awesome – breathtakingly impressive.

I have been astonished in the past months by the incredible talent and diversity among writers of new British musical theatre. The BEAM festival hosted by Mercury Musical Developments (MMD) and Musical Theatre Network (MTN) in March 2016 demonstrated the range and depth of talent among writers/composers as over 40 works were pitched or showcased in a couple of days. Since then, while exploring the possibility of employing some of these writers/creative teams to develop their work with our students at the University of Winchester, I have been impressed by the diversity of musical styles and the range of narrative structures being used. Musical theatre in this country incorporates a rich and varied melting pot of styles, genres, dramaturgies and creative processes.

The difficulty these incredible creative teams face is that there are insufficient outlets or audiences for new work. Universities around the country, like Winchester, have taken notice and are doing what we can by offering development opportunities for writers. This allows students to understand the creative process, to interact with emerging writers, to experience different dramaturgical processes and to input into devising or creating roles where there is no existing performance template. In the future these students may be the creators, the performers or the audiences for this new work, but there is a mountain to climb first.

We need more outlets for first, and crucially second and third, performances of these exciting new works – they need to be seen and heard. We need subsidised companies at all levels consciously to support new British musicals, and we need greater support for fringe and regional companies who are providing venues for new work.

Musical theatre is expensive simply because there are more people involved – it is the great collaborative art – so what to do? If each theatre-goer decided to attend one extra performance – and made it a new British musical – a ground swell of change might begin. Let’s lobby the Arts Council for support, but more importantly, lobby your local theatre to programme a new British musical – and then, crucially, get a crowd together to go and see it. As audiences let’s choose to support this great British art form by taking a chance on a new musical in whatever fringe, regional or national venue it appears. Audience interest changes arts policy, so let’s start now to support our writers and composers in social media, in print and with our bums on seats. Let’s sing new songs and tell new stories so that musical theatre remains a dynamic reflection of contemporary British culture.

What is a British musical? That’s a difficult question. Is a British musical a work that premiered in the UK, one that was written by British authors, financed by British money or has a British sensibility? And what on earth is a British sensibility? Since many musical theatre collaborations include creatives, producers or money from all over the place this is an increasingly fraught question. It is one that must be addressed, however, if we are to promote British musical theatre and especially new British writing.

A new book has just been published by Bloomsbury Methuen that contains case studies of 12 British musicals framed by a series of introductory chapters that explore the relationship between musicals and their social and historical contexts.

In the book Robert Gordon, Olaf Jubin and I are arguing that British musicals are different from American ones because of the difference in our social and cultural contexts, which promote different aesthetics in the works and different concerns among audiences. That’s not to say that defining a British musical isn’t complicated, but that in the immediate post-war period and as a result of our post-imperialist and European history we have our own concerns that are reflected in our musicals.

Case studies range from post-war Salad Days (1954) and Oliver! (1960) to global smash hits such as Les Misérables (1985) and The Phantom of the Opera (1986). They include the latest critical and box-office success Matilda (2011) as well as British favourites (Blood Brothers, 1983), cult shows (The Rocky Horror Show, 1975) and musicals with a pre-existing fan-base, such as Mamma Mia! (1999).