The School Musicals Company musicals: Doctor Dolittle and the Monkey Mayhem; Kitty Whittington; Pantastic; Paws and Claws by Matthew Crossey and Tom Kirkham

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.