New musicals bearing fruit

I spend a lot of time flying the flag for new musicals, and particularly British ones, both in print and here on this blog, as well as in my roles on various judging panels – like the recent first round of the Search for a Twitter Composer (and I’ll be reprising my judging duties for round two the weekend after next) and in my position on the board of Mercury Musical Developments.

And there’s nothing I like more than to celebrate the arrival of a genius one – let alone a merely good one – which is one of the reasons I was particularly disappointed by the failure of Matilda to be properly acknowledged on Broadway at last weekend’s Tony Awards.

Nevertheless, as Matilda shows, the good news is that we are capable of nurturing and developing great new musicals in the UK. And while that one had the creative might of the RSC behind it, there’s a range of independent producers, some big, others far smaller, but all unfailingly ambitious, who are also committed to creating the musicals of the future.

A few weeks ago I went to an industry workshop for The Water Babies, a new musical adaptation of the Reverend Charles Kingsley mid-19th century children’s novel that’s best known for the 1978 animated film version, featuring music by Chris Egan and book and lyrics by Ed Curtis and Guy Jones.

Its producer Tristan Baker told me it had taken some three years to get the show to this point.

It takes a long time creatively to get it right. But the key thing from my point of view is not to rush anything. Sometimes the creative process is rushed by the commercial process. Only when the show is right will it go on.

Meanwhile, there’s been a lot to get right and put in place, from funding, of course, to the writing itself and the technical challenges the show presents of presenting scenes seemingly below water. Baker thinks he’s solved this with a radical new technique that he also installed and tested on the bare stage of the Shaftesbury Theatre last year – and also invited people, myself included, to see.

He’s now hoping for out-of-town try-out next spring, with the West End to follow. Having done a jukebox show before with the Take That show Never Forget, he’s determined to back a new show now:

There’s a lot of talent out there. But too few producers are taking the risk. Producers want a safety net – whether it’s written by someone famous, or a catalogue that people know.

That’s exactly the struggle for recognition that many unknown composers face. Mark Carroll, a West End actor with some 25 years experience, has written two original musicals The Attic and Supernova. He self-financed workshops for them in West End theatres he was appearing in at the time – the Haymarket for The Attic, when he was appearing in Marguerite, and the Prince Edward for Supernova, when he was appearing there in Jersey Boys.

He was able to draw on cast members like Ruthie Henshall and Alexander Hanson for the first one, “but I still couldn’t get anyone through the door to see it.” For Supernova, he tried something else: he did a cast album of what he’d written, using great musical theatre voices like Hannah Waddingham and Alison Jiear, which also enabled him to record the backing tracks he’d need for the later workshop, as it has a rock sound so couldn’t be done with piano alone.

It all cost him some £15,000 of his own money to do all this, but he still hasn’t yet managed to get a commercial bite. As he now says,

I’m convinced that there’s got to be another way of launching a musical other than putting on a workshop. Being in the business for 25 years, I’ve done plenty of them. But it’s rare that workshops lead to productions, and unless you have a producer on board already, it seems you’re not going to get any further.

But he filmed both of them, and now has a DVD available to send to possible producers.

So even if they couldn’t make it down the road to spend an hour on a Thursday afternoon, I have a well cut, five camera, high definition DVD to give them to watch.

However, it’s a challenge even so to get that to them.

I’ve worked for Andrew Lloyd Webber regularly, but I still can’t get passed the fact that his office won’t accept unsolicited material, so he’s never listened to anything I’ve written. He says there’s no one writing new musicals, but I don’t think he’s looked for them or been to a theatre in the last 25 years to see something that isn’t his own.

Carroll was in the original cast of Miss Saigon, and says that although he was given £500 out of Mackintosh Foundation funds to help finance The Attic, he never heard back after he sent a DVD to the office at their request.

Carroll is now looking for someone else to take charge.

I’m not a producer and I don’t want to be one. I know it’s an uphill struggle. Supernova is in its infancy at just two years old, but I don’t know what the next step is.

Simon Greiff’s independent record label SimG Records provides another route to get shows heard by, but the writers must find their own financing for the recordings. SimG has just released a concept recording for Dan Looney’s The Confession Room with a cast that includes West Enders Anna-Jane Casey, Dean Chisnall (who was incidentally also in the workshop cast for The Water Babies), Alex Gaumond and Ross Hunter.

“There’s no other true independent record label devoted to supporting new writers and artists,” Grieff tells me. And it can produce results; when the label released a live recording of a one-night concert performance of Soho Cinders at the Queen’s Theatre, “it genuinely helped Steve Marmion at Soho Theatre decide to put it on, as he’d not seen the concert.” The same is true of Craig Adams’s LIFT that Soho also gave house room to, and where it did well: “It helps that the music was already out in the world through the CD,” says Greiff, though that album wasn’t produced by him but by Perfect Pitch (at no cost to the writers and without using their ACE subsidy).

There’s nothing, ultimately, to beat a staged production, where the work can actually be tested, not just heard – and to that end, tomorrow night Paul Rayfield’s Payback the Musical that Greiff developed and is directing opens at Riverside Studios.