Stiles and Drewe Best New Song Prize

Stiles and Drewe Best New Song Prize 2020 – a virtual concert streamed online via YouTube.

While the annual Sondheim Student Performer of the Year contest fell victim to Covid-19, the Stiles and Drewe Best New Song Prize which has run alongside it since 2008 was happily saved with the bonus of top musical theatre professionals performing the work of the 15 finalists.

Presented as a virtual concert on YouTube with the artists contributing from their own homes and generously working for nothing, this would normally have shared a West End stage with SSSSPOTY on a sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-June with the new songs performed by the 12 student finalists on top of their Sondheim song choices.

Having reduced the 167 entries submitted to Mercury Musical Developments to the best 15 and brought in Dan Gillespie-Sells, famed for Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the team behind smash-hit Six, composer and past winner Tim Sutton and award-winning Cassie Kinoshi to help with the judging, we were good to go.

Going off first can be the kiss of death but not in this case as victory went to ‘I’m Your Guy’, an unlikely buddy song between man and robot from Amir Shoenfeld and Matthew Greene’s Benny In Beta, with which Tyrone Huntley kicked off the two-hour show.

Judge George Stiles called it “a wonderful marriage between words and music” and confessed it was so catchy he was playing it every day. The £1,000 prize was put up by Joanne Benjamin and The Entertainment Business.

Runner-up “with barely an eyelash“ between it and the winner, according to Anthony Drewe, came the clever ‘My First Ex-Boyfriend’ from Son of Rambow, by Miranda Cooper, Richard Marsh and Nick Coler who shared the £250 prize donated by the Stephen Sondheim Society.

Six star Natalie Paris perfectly conveyed a girl fretting her life might be over at 17 – “I know there‘s nothing of us left” – acknowledging that while there will be other ex-boyfriends, there is nothing quite like the first one.

There was a further £250 cheque for the song with the greatest ‘Vision, Voice and Potential’ which went to ‘Broken Guitar’, a challenging insight into the transgender and non-binary world from the Meg McGrady-Zoe Morris musical The Phase. Alex Thomas-Smith from Dear Evan Hansen did full justice to the vocals.

Three songwriting teams, Jonathan O’Neill/Isaac Savage, Julian Woolford/Richard John and Freya Smith/Jack Williams, each had two numbers in the final, a feat in itself but they went home empty-handed.

I was sorry one of the Woolford/John entries ‘Minnesota’, wonderfully interpreted by Luke Bayer, did not make it to the podium while Vikki Stone’s ‘The Something Else’ also stood out as a song with much truth in it.

That vivacious performer Marisha Wallace gave ‘You’ve Got A Problem’ – “and the problem is you!” – the full works on behalf of composers Rob Green and Nic Harvey.

And even the sublime voices of Rebecca Trehearn and Louise Dearman could not tease a prize for ‘Two Ways To Australia’, by Rachel Bellman and Elizabeth Sybil Charlesworth, or ‘Home’ by O’Neill and Savage, fascinating though both entries were.

Zizi Strallen, Fra Fee, Lizzie Bea, Allyson Ava-Brown, Laura Pitt-Pulford, Melanie La Barrie, Lauren Samuels and Maiya Quansah-Breed did their songs proud, the sound quality was good (musical director: Steve Ridley) and there was entertainment from young ‘CheerUpCharlie’ Charlie Kristensen and Omar Baroud while the judges were out comparing notes. Mercury Musical Development’s ‘Keep Writing’ Support Fund was the beneficiary.