Thursday, February 13, 2014
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 b…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 08:57AMTuesday, February 4, 2014
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 06:27AMSaturday, November 16, 2013
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 06:43AMMonday, October 7, 2013
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 10:39AMMonday, August 12, 2013
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 backgro…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 05:01AMMonday, July 29, 2013
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 06:13AMWednesday, July 24, 2013
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 “di…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 05:21AMWednesday, June 5, 2013
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 …
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 10:46AMMonday, May 20, 2013
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 w…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:42AMTuesday, May 7, 2013
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 …
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 05:41AMMonday, April 22, 2013
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:14AMSunday, March 31, 2013
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:01AMThursday, February 28, 2013
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:56AMMonday, February 11, 2013
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:23AMTuesday, January 29, 2013
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 05:20AMTuesday, January 15, 2013
Nearly every interview and promotion has highlighted the fact that Les Misérables was sung live on set but was it worth it?
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 04:22AMSaturday, October 27, 2012
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 …
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:10AMSaturday, October 13, 2012
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 relev…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:53PMSaturday, September 29, 2012
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 03:07AMSunday, September 16, 2012
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 t…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 09:24AMThursday, September 6, 2012
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. …
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 11:14AMSunday, August 5, 2012
“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 T…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 01:22PMSunday, July 22, 2012
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 …
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 02:36PMSaturday, July 7, 2012
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…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 02:13PMSunday, June 24, 2012
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 naturall…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 09:04AMTuesday, June 12, 2012
The teaser trailer was recently released for the film version of long-running show Les Miserables. The video contains Anne Hathaway singing ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ as the unfortunate…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:38AMSunday, May 27, 2012
A Twitter storm has once more erupted around the use of celebrity casting for the Jesus Christ Superstar arena tour taking place at the end of this year, and I can’t help wondering why ind…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 11:27AMSunday, May 13, 2012
On 9 May I attended an event hosted by Wide Awake Devon and Dance in Devon, to discuss the arts situation within the region. We met at a village hall in North Devon, in a room decorated wi…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:20AMTuesday, May 8, 2012
Wide Awake Devon is the perfect title for this organisation which is addressing the arts situation in this sleepy south west county. Thanks to the work of Emily Williams (22), Monique Luckma…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 05:38AMMonday, April 16, 2012
Dubious. A word I would use to describe my views regarding movies that have been turned into musicals. I have always pegged them as a lesser musical, right up there with jukebox musicals as …
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 08:50AMWednesday, April 4, 2012
It is a slight lie to say this was my first ballet, as my very first theatrical experience was watching The Nutcracker age 10 with my school. But we spent most of our time trying to force th…
SOURCE: A Younger Theatre at 07:55AM 
