When it comes to new British musicals, size matters

When musical theatre writers get together to chew the fat about the ‘state of the industry’ over a warm glass of press-night wine, the same old subjects tend to trickle through: lack of money, lack of resources and – crucially – lack of programming opportunities. After all, it can be a strange existence cooking up imaginative shows over a period of many years for them to simply never see the light of day.

But recently, I’m happy to report, the mood among us musical folk has been rather more buoyant, for we’re in a quiet and accidental new golden age for new British work; Ride, The Little Big Things, Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder! and Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) having broken through to join the now well-established mega-hits Six and Operation Mincemeat as thriving examples that the ‘new British musical’ is actually alive and well. Not just well but – rarely and refreshingly – genuinely ‘original’ too; source material drawn not from commercially attractive box-office IP [intellectual property] but smaller, lesser-known subject matters or entirely new stories altogether.

Yet, in a year when the supersized American imports of The Devil Wears Prada and Mean Girls also arrive upon our shores, there is a noticeable trend among the new British shows: their size. For where once we would have looked at Howard Goodall’s The Hired Man as an affordable chamber musical, its cast of about 16 now seems positively gargantuan. Ride and Two Strangers are two-handers, Operation Mincemeat and Kathy and Stella have multi-roling ensembles of five and seven respectively, and hopefully Six needs no explanation. The Little Big Things hits a cast in double figures, boasting a relatively bulbous 12 onstage players.

How have we pivoted so swiftly to such diminutive cast sizes? Let’s be honest: cash. Gone are the days of the 1980s Lloyd Webber/Mackintosh mega-musicals with their casts of 30. Now, with an escalating cost-of-living crisis and shrinking theatre budgets – particularly from local councils – it’s only in our most well-resourced subsidised institutions that a new musical might comfortably afford the extravagance of an ensemble. The National Theatre’s three most recent offerings – The Witches, Hex and Standing at the Sky’s Edge – might happily push past 20, but elsewhere, budgets are increasingly squeezed.

As many of these new works emerged as passion projects – usually without commercial commissioning or enhancements at their outset – their initial fringe runs necessitated small casts to be affordably produced in the first place; be it Ride at London’s Vault Festival, Kathy and Stella at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe or Operation Mincemeat at London’s New Diorama. Obscurer topics that might initially put a commercial producer off the costly risk of a larger cast also mean writers subtly adjust expectations of production by reducing the easiest overhead: the payroll. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie proves it can be done – a story that needed a classroom ensemble for full feel-good effect (with a cast of about 20) – but that show seems to be the exception, not the rule when looking at the recent climate of original work. 

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