As someone who never connected with the Drama curriculum at school but spent their evenings and weekends doing step-ball-changes and bashing out alto lines at the top of their lungs, the musical theatre issue of Drama & Theatre was always going to be one I looked forward to. I’m not alone in feeling slightly evangelical about the subject. Whether it’s big-budget movie musicals like Mary Poppins or stage revivals of shows like West Side Story, musical theatre can provide a ‘way in’ to the broader ecosystem of drama and theatre.
There are few movie musicals that have had such a profound global impact in recent years as Frozen. Writing about the new specially adapted production for young performers reminded me of the thrill of recreating on-screen magic on the stages of local theatres and schools. Did it make me envious of the kids that will get the opportunity to stage it? Certainly.
There’s a dance strand running through this issue too, as we wanted to highlight the brilliant apprenticeship scheme at Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures. Aiming to seek out talent from underrepresented backgrounds, it’s an innovative model that would benefit from being replicated across the creative industries. Rather than auditioning, the apprentices come to the company’s attention through workshops and outreach programmes, making for a much more organic search process. For those wanting to find out more about New Adventures, the company and its founder Matthew Bourne are the focus of our practitioner feature this issue. Hattie Fisk also headed out this issue to look into another trailblazing career development scheme: the bespoke mentoring scheme at Emma Rice’s theatre company Wise Children.
Over the last few years, you’d have been hard pressed to go to the cinema and not see ‘based on the novel by…’ in a film’s closing credits. This trend for adapting books for the big screen is now being seen on the stage as well. The National Theatre has been at the forefront of this, staging productions and national tours of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and War Horse. This year, we’re seeing the trend grow – and now it’s not just children’s books enjoying on-stage success. Two of my personal favourite novels – Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Hanya Yanigahara’s epic A Little Life – are hitting the West End in the coming months with new, hotly anticipated stage adaptations. We asked John Johnson to look into this programming trend. With many practitioners and educators frustrated by drama and theatre merely being seen as a footnote in an English curriculum, will this practice help engage students with interdisciplinary learning while keeping theatre at the fore?
Elsewhere in the issue, we ask writers Maddie Rice and Tom Machell to give us their top practical tips for writing for live performance, and Phil Cleaves learns about Butterflies, a production by Polka Theatre, Half Moon Theatre and Tangled Feet to support children suffering with anxiety following lockdown and the Covid-19 pandemic.
We hope you enjoy the issue!
- Freya Parr, editor
