One of the week's biggest musical theatre news items is that Sky Arts has commissioned a musical theatre chat show with Elaine Paige as its host. I was super excited when this news broke bec…
I was initially going to write a blog about how I have fallen out of love with musicals, hence my absence in blogging recently. However, I then realised that isn't true and what I actually m…
One of my biggest frustrations as a musical theatre dork is snobbery about which musicals are better. This is an argument that continues in any art form of low brow vs high brow and the favo…
Growing up, my first experience of musicals was from a tape of Andrew Lloyd Webber songs that me and the family played in the car almost continuously the summer I turned 10. This was added t…
I know that anyone who only knows Dame Judi Dench for her Shakespeare roles and as 'M' in James Bond may think this is a crazy statement. For me, it is because of her Shakespeare background …
So this is perhaps my guiltiest pleasure musical of the moment, but who doesn't love a cast of athletic men singing and dancing their faces off? The show is a Disney Theatrical Productions s…
YouTube is an extremely interesting place for entertaining people with videos and for creating communities and networking. You have your vloggers, your cat videos and musicians who are "disc…
I have written before about the lack of new writing and especially of shows for the younger generation. However, with X Factor musicals and Britain’s Got Talent entrants, is there now …
Many Brits and Irish have long been fans of the 2006 indie film Once, especially for the music by Glen Hansard, known for his band The Frames and appearing in The Commitments: the song he…
The Olivier Awards are always an exciting time for the theatre community and there was great anticipation as ITV were showing highlights of the award ceremony, the first time they have been …
My title for this blog comes from a speech by George Asprey at the start of a performance of The Lion King on 14 April 2013 in London. Fans of the show will know that the actor portraying Sc…
There has often been comment that musicals don't appeal to young people and the bulk of the audience is often made up of people of a certain age. This may be a hideous generalisation on my p…
A Chorus Line makes a triumphant return to the West End for the first time since it premiered in the UK in the late seventies, which ties in with research I have been carrying out as part of…
Recently I read a book by Stacy Woolf documenting the feminist history of the musical (Changed For Good: A feminist history of the Broadway musical, 2011: Oxford University Press) and it got…
Most of the musical theatre community was shocked and appalled by David Sexton's recent article in which he attacked not just the genre of musical theatre but the people who enjoy and work i…
Nearly every interview and promotion has highlighted the fact that Les Misérables was sung live on set but was it worth it?
This week was the London opening of Loserville. A brand new home grown musical, it seemed like it could’ve been the show everyone had been waiting for. So why, instead of rave reviews …
Last year I wrote a response to fellow writer Elinor Walpole's article on the relevancy of musical theatre in today's society. I argued that musicals didn't need to be explicitly relevant to…
Having been wholly uninterested in anything related to the economics of theatre, I’d managed to get through three years of being a Musical Theatre undergraduate without ever hearing th…
Catharsis is a Greek word meaning 'cleansing' or 'purification'. Aristotle explains catharsis as the “purging of the spirit of morbid and base ideas or emotions by witnessing the playi…
As September rolls around it often means the start of new adventures for us youngsters. I am no exception, and as I go back to university for my masters, I find myself in a reflective mood. …
"If you’re a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that’s dangerously close to arrogance." " Trevor Nunn This qu…
In the past two weeks the process of casting in musical theatre has been well and truly turned on its head. It started with @westendproducer‘s #Search For A Twitter Star (SFATS) final …
Like any argument, the controversy is often split in two with a chasm separating the opposing sides. The latest one is news of the Spice Girls musical Viva Forever opening in December. My tw…
Many will declare that there is in fact no problem with the West End – thousands upon thousands of us watch the shows and have a brilliant time. Sadly that is just theatre's naturally …