Youth Music Theatre UK’s production of Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music plays at the Rose Theatre, Kingston as part of the summer season 2014
In its tenth anniversary year, Youth Music Theatre UK (YMT) launches a groundbreaking season of international work in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland to be produced during the summer of 2014.
Youth Music Theatre UK is the leading music theatre company for young people aged 11-21, offering high standard training and mentoring and a proven way for young people to enter the creative industries – whether as a performer, musician, stagehand or administrator. YMT, as one of eight National Youth Music Organisations, is supported and recognised by Arts Council England and the Department for Education. YMT is the largest commissioner of new musical theatre in the UK, with a focus on the staging of new musical theatre and the development of the creative and social skills of young people.
Casts are chosen from the many hundreds of talented young people who auditioned nationwide in January and February this year. The very best are selected to join YMT and they rehearse and perform these productions during a two-week residential summer course.
Ali & Nino, which will premiere at the South Hill Park Arts Centre in Bracknell (23-24 August), marks the beginning of a major project working with theatres in Georgia and Azerbaijan, with the Tblisi International Theatre Festival and diaspora communities in the UK, to bring this international bestselling novel to the stage.
Ali & Nino is one of the world’s few ‘foundling’ novels, the authorship of which is still disputed. Set in the Middle East during the First World War, on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, a young Muslim Prince falls in love with a Christian Georgian Princess. Ali and Nino find themselves swept up in Azerbaijan’s fight for independence in this haunting story, a testament to the strength of love in a war torn world.
With a text in English, Azeri and Georgian, music drawing on influences from Georgian polyphonic singing and Persian mugham, and performers drawn from all three countries, this promises to be one of YMT’s most ambitious projects to date. Directed by National Theatre of Scotland director Joe Douglas with music by Tarek Merchant, this initial development of Ali & Nino marks the beginning of a major international collaboration with theatres in the Caucuses. It is produced in association with South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell.
Ali & Nino will also go into production for a major screen adaptation in autumn 2014. Directed by Asif Kapadia, director of the acclaimed Senna, it is scripted by Christopher Hampton and produced by Kris Thykier of Peapie Films.
Other YMT summer productions include Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music at the Rose Theatre, Kingston (28-31 August). Soul Music is Terry Pratchett’s 16th Discworld novel and follows the short-lived but glamorous musical career of ‘The Band with Rocks In’, a group of musicians who become famous after their leader, Imp Y Celyn – Welsh for ‘bud of the holly’ – becomes possessed by the essence of an addictive new music dubbed ‘Music With Rocks In’.
Directed by Luke Sheppard, associate director of the RSC’s Matilda the Musical in London and New York and helmer of the recent transfer of In The Heights, playing at the Southwark Playhouse, the show has been adapted by stand-up comedian Andrew Doyle. With original music by Craig Adams, recently nominated for Best Original Music at the WhatsOnStage Awards for Lift and Thérèse Raquin at the Finborough, Soul Music is choreographed by Cressida Carré, winner of the Off West End award for Best Choreography for Titanic.
YMT also presents two world premiere productions at the Barbican Theatre in Plymouth, The Dance Connection (15-16 August) and Not the End of the World (29-30 August).
Not the End of the World is based on the novel by the award-winning children’s author Geraldine McCaughrean. A darkly subversive retelling of the Noah story, the book was first published in 2004 and was the winner of that year’s Whitbread Children’s Book Award. Not the End of the World asks what it was really like when the heavens opened and the world drowned – and what might have happened in the days that followed. How did it feel to head into the unknown? And how did it feel to spend day after day shut up with every kind of animal – hungry, angry and afraid?
Directed by Charlotte Conquest, the show will have music by Sonum Batra and choreography from Darrell Aldridge. Conquest has been a staff director for Trevor Nunn at the Royal National Theatre, assistant director for Michael Attenborough at the Royal Shakespeare Company, staff director for Terry Johnson for RNT’s tour of The London Cuckolds and associate Director at the Northcott Theatre.
YMT will also present two new productions in Northern Ireland, an actor/musician production of Macbeth at the Lyric Theatre Belfast and Triptych, based around the poetry of TS Elliot Prize-winner Sinéad Morrissey. The show will be presented at The MAC – Belfast’s new arts complex in the revitalised Cathedral Quarter of the City.
YMT’s production of Macbeth (23-26 July) will see Belfast-born musician Garth McConaghie’s sung-through composition heightening Shakespeare’s classic text. Adapted and directed by Stuart Harvey (senior youth theatre leader for Chichester Festival Theatre), the musical version of this classical play combines fierce electronic music with contemporary choreography from Rachel Birch-Lawson and classic text.
Set in a nameless Asian state in the future, the digital world has imploded as the internet crashes and screens randomly flicker in the corridors of power. Macbeth, an ambitious head of security, monitors groups of young men and women plotting to bring down the establishment. But a supernatural encounter will have epic repercussions. Treachery, deceit and blind ambition are to be found in the shadows of a neo-noir world where no one can be trusted.
Triptych (2014) will give young performers from the 2014 YMT auditions the chance to work with some of the most exciting and innovative emerging female composers in the UK and from abroad.
YMT will be selecting three female composers under the age of 30 through an open application process and then commissioning from them three new works for rehearsal by the YMT company. Open to both British and international composers, YMT is looking for young women with something to say about the future of the world we live in and their place in it. The works will based around themes suggested by Sinéad Morrissey’s poetry. Triptych will be directed by Kath Burlinson and choreographed by Heather Douglas.
Every year YMT reaches up to 2,000 young people to create the very best work and to give every participant a valuable experience. The experience they gain and the contacts they make prove invaluable and many of YMT’s alumni go on to drama school and into the profession – following in the footsteps of chart topping singer/songwriters Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith, Channel 4 Fresh Meat’s Charlotte Ritchie, and Freya Wilson, who starred as Princess Elizabeth in The King’s Speech and who plays Violette Selfridge in ITV’s Mr Selfridge.
YMT originated and co-produced the musical Loserville which ran in London’s West End in 2012 and which was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best New Musical.
YMT workshops and courses are fee-paying. YMT offers fundraising support and some young people have found amazing ways to raise fees in the past – including 24 hour dancing across the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, organising local cabarets and gala nights and other wacky sponsored events.
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