Whistle Down the WInd – NYMT

Whistle Down the Wind, a National Youth Music Theatre production, is performed at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, from 24–28 July.

If the 80-plus National Youth Music Theatre cast of Whistle Down the Wind felt added pressure from the presence of their president, the Earl of Wessex, in the packed Rose Theatre audience, you would never have guessed it. And there was a bit of showbiz royalty too – Tom Chambers, recent West End star of Top Hat and winner of Strictly Come Dancing, who is a patron of the NYMT and a one-time member, was there. He is just one successful artist to have started out with the company. Others include such luminaries as Jude Law, Sheridan Smith, Matt Lucas, Nigel Harman and Jessie J.

The Earl of Wessex, of course, has a musical theatre background. As a young man he used to work for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group and helped with a number of their hit shows. How he must have enjoyed the terrific efforts of the current group, mostly teenagers, assembled from all over the UK.

Who knows, he and we may have seen future stars to match the achievements of past alumni of an organisation which for more than 35 years has enabled thousands of young actors and singers to develop their potential to a worldwide audience, their embryonic talents having taken them on some occasions to the West End and Broadway.

This was not the Whistle Down the Wind that Lloyd Webber wrote with American songwriter Jim Steinman which produced the famed title song as well as a No. 1 in 18 countries with ‘No Matter What’.

The NYMT version, faithfully adapted by Russell Labey with music and lyrics by Richard Taylor, from Mary Hayley Bell’s novel later made into a 1961 movie starring Mary’s daughter Hayley, was written in 1989 long before Lloyd Webber’s and while it may not have hit songs, it certainly has enough good ones for young voices to get their teeth into.

The two main parts of Cathy and Charlie Bostock unveiled some particularly noteworthy talent. Zak Baker, a diminutive 12-year-old from St Albans, oozed confidence, had the Lancashire accent off to a tee, and sang and acted as if born to it as the cheeky brother who, with his two sisters, stumble on a wounded convict in a barn and think they have met the son of God simply because he yells “Jesus Christ!” when disturbed.

It is a hard idea to swallow but Baker and Jemimah Taylor, a 17-year-old from Bradford with a soaringly memorable voice, who plays big sister Cathy and is charged with the bulk of the singing, make it work in a complex story directed with passion by the NYMT’s founder Jeremy James Taylor who has such a soft spot for Whistle that his lads and lasses have now done it five times since 1993.

It is a pity we did not hear more of 12-year-old Adrien Rolet, as there is nothing quite so pure in music as a perfectly-pitched boy soprano. When he kicks off the show with ‘Behold!’ and later in the ensemble piece ‘Hymn’, Rolet reveals an ethereal beauty of tone that stays in the mind.

Phoebe Roberts is good as younger sister Nan and there is also some strong playing from Henry Roadnight as the irritable Vicar who has no answers for the children’s probing questions about why God allows good things, like a kitten, to die young.

Mention must be made too of 13-year-old Annabel Parsons, whose ‘Angels’ duet with the convict-who-might-be-Jesus, played by 18-year-old Jonathan Carlton with perhaps not enough menace, stood out in a well-drilled, word-perfect production which builds up to a dramatic climax as the massed forces of the law appear rushing from the back of the auditorium to deal with the fire and apprehend the convict. But when the smoke has cleared, no convict (or was it Jesus?) is to be seen or found.

Musical supervisor James Rose and musical director Benjamin Holder get the last ounce out of the score and their eight gifted musicians while choreographer Kay Shepherd has done a massive job with a massive cast, never letting the pace flag.

Much missed from the programme was a list of the songs and who sings them, a must with any musical never mind one with such a large cast and complicated plot.

Whistle Down the Wind forms part of a three-week International Youth Arts Festival at the Rose. Next up for the NYMT is the premiere of The Other School, written by Dougal Irivine and Dominic Marsh, at the St James Theatre in Victoria (14-17 August) and their season ends with a site-specific production of West Side Story in the vast Victoria Warehouse in Manchester (21-24 August).

Jeremy Chapman