One more response to this blog post in the Stage by the lovely Mark Shenton, which refers to the musical theatre conference I'm doing with LIPA:
http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2010/06/the-state-of-british-musicals-and-beacon/
@ Richard, who said: “Unfortunately, where would these new musicals go? West End theatre owners (who are also mostly producers) seem to go out of their way to fill their theatres with the old, tired, or wont go aways.”
It depends what you want, Richard. If you just want to know that there’s a place for new musicals, then rest assured: youth and community theatre is alive and well, and brimming with opportunities to put new work on its feet if we can only get away from this idea that work is not successful unless it gets into town.
Youth Music Theatre UK (YMT) produce seven or eight brand new musicals every year. These are full productions, with lights and costumes and sets, with professional directors and choreographer and writers. They happen in proper professional venues, even some in London. In fact, it looks like a show that started out as a YMT commission is about to go into the West End: Loserville, by James Bourne of Busted and Son Of Dork.
The thing is, there’s no keeping a good show down. If the material is really, honestly good enough to keep a lot of people engaged in the narrative, it will succeed. It will because money may open doors, but good stories are what keep audiences in their seats.
There are other places to develop new work: I’m writing a musical that will take the form of a string of short films which collectively tell a narrative whole. If I ever bloody get the time to finish it, there’s nothing to stop me grabbing my little handy-cam and a couple of actor mates and filming a few YouTube tests, is there? If the storytelling is good enough, it might take off, and if it’s not, then clearly I’d want to work on it some more until it is.
There are public spaces all over England where you can get performing licenses for not much money, and perform some new musical theatre. The London Underground is one such place: I see musicians all the time. How about a short Busking Musical with three characters? How about a Busking Soap Opera Musical for the regular business commuter to follow every day for five days?
Someone recently did Romeo & Juliet on Twitter. No matter how successful you think it was, it’s free and it was new writing. What about “Tweet Space!” the musical, featuring plot on Twitter and songs on MySpace?
I don’t know. It took me all of a few minutes to think of these. They are cheap or free. They don’t demand lots of writing. They have the potential to reach new audiences for something one might call music theatre, whatever that is.
If anyone would like to join us for our LIPA conference, we’re running a free session online, this Tuesday evening from 7-9pm. All you need to do is email Lydia Bates on l.bates@lipa.ac.uk and ask for the specific URL link for the session. It requires that you have Flash installed, but that’s it. Come and debate all of this with us live online!
