It's show time!: Choosing a school musical

Robert Legg
Friday, September 1, 2023

Robert Legg, music teacher at Icknield Community College, shares 10 golden rules for getting the right show for your school

Honk!, Wellington Young Musicians’ Programme, 2016
Honk!, Wellington Young Musicians’ Programme, 2016

Stephen Gibbs

When the curtain falls on a successful production, it doesn't take long before you ask yourself that inevitable question: ‘So, what are we going to do next?’ Choosing a school show is an annual challenge, a process rather than an event, and – above all – something that everyone wants to get absolutely right. It's a familiar situation, with plenty of fresh complications.

Here are ten golden rules to help you get to a good result with as little stress as possible:

Rule 1: Know the decision-makers

Before starting any discussions, you should know who your decision-makers are. Everyone in your core team needs to have a say, but having lots of additional, conflicting opinions can be unhelpful. As a minimum, your director and music director must be involved. If your team is coordinated by a producer – especially where this is a senior colleague with the power of veto – it's wise to have that person included from the beginning. When you’ve established who gets to choose your show, you can think about your timeline, making sure that you've allowed everyone enough time to research the shows that make it onto your shortlist.

Rule 2: Know where to look

Spend time online exploring what's available. Many longstanding rights holders – the likes of Warner Chappell, Glocken Verlag, Samuel French, Tams-Witmark and Musicscope – have closed down, reduced their activity or had their catalogues snapped up by the two big players: Music Theatre International and Concord Theatricals. There are smaller companies still worth exploring. For works at the classical end of the musical theatre spectrum, it's worth checking the Boosey & Hawkes list. Nick Hern publishes a number of sophisticated new pieces. The Really Useful Group holds the rights to Andrew Lloyd Webber's output. For primary schools, Out of the Ark, Faber Music and Starshine offer a really good selection of accessible pieces.

Rule 3: Make the most of your team

When you've built a shortlist of appealing shows, it's time to think about the practicalities. How may people do you need to cast and how often do you want them to be on stage? If you always have 100 students involved, you’re going to need a work with potential for a large chorus. Do you have actors with the ‘chops’ to hold down the main roles? Taking a careful look at the advertised list of characters is crucial. If you’re hoping to stage Les Misérables, do you have enough vocally-strong males? If you're aiming for a Return to the Forbidden Planet, have you got actors who can play instruments on stage? Even more importantly, think about what your students need for the production to be a worthwhile, enjoyable and stimulating learning experience. Getting the difficulty level right is absolutely key.

Rule 4: Consider what lands well

Think about how you’ll negotiate any interpretive difficulties that your shortlisted shows might pose. Some of the biggest hits of past decades need careful directing if they're to land well with contemporary audiences. How can you portray the romantic relationship at the heart of Disney's Beauty and the Beast without parading Belle as a textbook case of Stockholm syndrome? What directorial sleight of hand can you deploy in Little Shop of Horrors to avoid presenting the abuse of Audrey as the stuff of comedy? If you're not convinced you can reframe or subvert an unacceptable, unpleasant or openly offensive theme, it's time to put that piece back on the shelf.

Rule 5: Don't fret about audience size

Don't worry too much about attracting your audience. If you're working with actors and musicians who are students, their parents, carers and friends will want to come and see them whether they're in Moana, Die Meistersinger or Thoroughly Modern Millie. As long as the cast members are having a good time and chatting about the experience of building their production, news of even the most obscure show will spread. It's much more important that you choose a work that everyone will enjoy spending months of their lives rehearsing. You have to be sure that the music and the story are strong enough to sustain everyone's interest and commitment throughout an extended rehearsal period.

Rule 6: Think long-term

It's worth taking a medium- to long-term perspective. A good question to ask yourselves is whether you've managed to achieve enough dramatic and musical range in your choice of shows over a period of a few years. If your last two productions were Aladdin and The Lion King, maybe it's time for something outside the Disney stable. If you always put on ‘book’ musicals, consider something sung through. Similarly, try to build some variety in the constitution of your band so that you create opportunities for string players and other orchestral musicians as well as for your keyboard players, guitarists, drummers and bassists. It works well to plan a few years at a time, and keeping a ‘wish list’ of the shows you’d like to do when the circumstances arise is a great idea.

Rule 7: Build on past successes

Discovering new repertoire is always rewarding, but so too is recovering old ground. If you've especially enjoyed staging a particular show, bringing it back in a new production, with a different emphasis, and with a different cast, can develop fresh insights. For both director and musical director, having an existing working knowledge of the script and score allows more time to focus on the finer details of the production and on individual performances. You may find your second venture Into the Woods is darker and more dangerous than your first…

JESS PARKER© JESS PARKER
Beauty and the Beast, backstage crew, 2021

Rule 8: Consider technical challenges

It's really important to think through any technical issues. My collaborator on a production of Tim Minchin's Matilda observed the MTI director's guide to that show which, while pedantically explaining the concept of ‘a rehearsal’ and the purpose of ‘an audition’, remains silent on the question of how to make a piece of chalk move magically through the air to inscribe a threatening message on a blackboard, in plain sight, unaided by human hand. We found our answer – strong magnets, great lighting and a lucky break – but only after a good deal of trial and error, and a fair amount of worry. If you're about to choose a show with a similarly crucial ‘set piece’ in the drama, give some thought at this early stage to how you’ll realise it within the parameters of your budget.

Rule 9: Don't necessarily follow the crowd

Don't be afraid to stray off the beaten track. Aside from the behemoths of music theatre – perennial shows like Guys and Dolls, The Wizard of Oz, Chicago and Oliver! – there are lesser-known works being staged in schools the length and breadth of the country. Online communities of music educators are a great place to explore what colleagues are doing, what's worked well, and what's new. The Music Theatre Educators' Alliance is another good forum for sharing intelligence about emerging work. And if you're looking for a show in the public domain – or the missing trombone part to a musical that goes up in a fortnight – the generous folk of Reddit can very often help you find the PDF files you need.

Rule 10: Dare to create

If all else fails, why not create a musical of your own? When you've directed, conducted or accompanied yourself into a stupor, you might find that inspiration comes knocking. Writing your own piece gives you the opportunity to weave a story and musical numbers around your school's resources, making the most of your tap dancers, 10-part choir, steel band, Year 12 basso profundo or whatever other oddities you have at your disposal. I'm currently working with Adam Rowe – longstanding head of drama at the Oxfordshire comprehensive where we both work – to create the songs for our new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Finding time to write is a challenge, so we've scheduled our production for December 2025. You can follow our progress, and give us feedback on the early drafts of our songs, by following the link below.

Epilogue

While we wait for our version of Scrooge to find his musical voice, we're really excited to have chosen our production for next year. Our spring 2024 show will be Billy, the musical version of Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall's play Billy Liar, which has a fantastic score by John Barry, famous as the creator of the James Bond theme, and a libretto by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, best known for their television series, The Likely Lads. After that, we're bringing back our production of Alan Menken and Glenn Slater's Sister Act, which got as far as its dress rehearsal in March 2020 and had to be cancelled when – well, we all remember how that month ended.

Where will your next show take you? Somewhere appealing? Or somewhere appalling? Whether you're working on the familiar or the downright peculiar, take time to make your choice the best it can be. School shows are the most fondly remembered parts of many students’ time in education and – who knows? – next year's piece could be the best yet.

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