The rarely-performed Meet Me in St Louis is to be Grange Park Opera’s musical for their 2020 summer season.
The title song apart, the show has such showstoppers as ‘The Trolley Song’, ‘Under the Bamboo Tree’, ‘Skip to My Lou’ and ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’.
Better known as an early (1944) Judy Garland movie, it was turned into a stage musical in 1989 and played 252 performances on Broadway, with George Hearn heading the cast.
Its only professional UK appearance came at the Landor Theatre in Clapham where it played for a month over Christmas/New Year in 2013-14.
The feelgood score is by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, who added new songs to the ones they wrote for the film 45 years earlier.
Meet Me in St Louis will have six performances from 6 June to 4 July 2020 at Grange Park Opera’s Theatre in the Woods at West Horsley Place, Surrey. The show will be directed by Jo Davies with music in the hands of the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by John Rigby. Cast yet to be announced.
Previous Grange Park musicals have been Fiddler on the Roof (with Bryn Terfel), Oliver!, Oklahoma! and this year Porgy and Bess.
Before Meet Me in St Louis, Grange Park’s sister company Pimlico Opera will be going back to Bronzefield women’s prison in March to put on Hairspray, using professional creatives and lead actors working alongside “residents” who aren’t there for parking offences.
For Pimlico’s last prison show there in November 2018, money launderers, drug runners and, yes, even a murderer supported Olivier-nominated Laura Pitt-Pulford in the title role in a joyous revival of Sweet Charity.
Seventeen inmates of Europe’s largest all-female prison rehearsed for five weeks with six professional actors, orchestra and director/choreographer Nikki Woollaston in a specially-erected theatre within the Category A prison on the outskirts of Ashford, Surrey.
Hairspray will run for six public performances between 7-15 March 2020. This will be Pimlico’s 24th prison musical since founder Wasfi Kani OBE introduced the idea with Sweeney Todd at Wormwood Scrubs in 1991.
Since then Pimlico has worked with over a thousand prisoners and taken 60,000 members of the public to see their joint efforts. There is also a performance specifically for the other prisoners many of whom have never been in a theatre before. The box office opens on 26 November 2019.
Jeremy Chapman
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