The School Musicals Company is a relatively new outfit: a family business set up by former classroom teachers who wanted to write musicals for school students – as they say in their introduction, ‘to bring stories to life with an up-to-date, humorous approach that actually “gets kids” and what they are exposed to’. The four examples I've read take pre-existing stories and recreate them with lots of big characters, humour and pathos, and around ten original songs apiece.
Doctor Dolittle and the Monkey Mayhem involves a cast of 33 speaking roles in an adventure which takes Dolittle and his host of animal friends from the village of Puddleby to Africa where they find themselves in danger of being eaten, but instead save a community of monkeys from an unspecified epidemic. Like all the musicals, the book and music are combined into a resource which offers school-centric extras such as character profiles with numbers of lines, tips on adapting for smaller or larger casts, staging, costumes, props, performance notes on the style of each song, a glossary of words which students might find more difficult, and ideas for auditions – how to run them, which extracts or songs to choose for the purpose, and so on.
Kitty Whittington re-casts the famous mayor of London as an orphan girl who escapes a life of drudgery in the village of Grindstone only to undergo a number of trials on her way to, and having arrived in the capital city. It touches on a number of issues such as class barriers and the rule of law, and as such, there are starters suggested to incorporate PSHE, reading and writing into the process of working towards a production. Indeed, written as they are with school groups in mind, all the books offer these valuable suggestions for exploring the plots or characters as part of PSHE, spoken language, reading, writing or personal development.
Pantastic is perhaps the truest of this selection to its original plot, following the Darling children to Neverland and back, but with, of course, a brand new script and 11 original songs, while Paws and Claws is an entirely original story, albeit inspired by the Montagues and Capulets of Romeo and Juliet – looking at fighting between cats and dogs and a pair who form an unlikely friendship.
These resources have everything you could need to mount a production with a good-sized group aged 9 to 13. They will be enjoyed by the students who have plenty of great roles to get their teeth into, the opportunity for laughs, and really good catchy songs; and as is traditional there are jokes for the adults hidden in the script such that there's no danger of stultification for your audience either. Licensing instructions appear at the back of each book, which also comes with a CD of music – and the whole thing comes in at an absolute steal of £22. I think they're brilliant.