Q&A: The School Musicals Company

HC: Can you tell me how you combined your experience to launch the company in 2016?

TK: I was, until this year, an English and Drama teacher in a secondary school, but I've also done quite a lot of playwrighting.

MC: I was working for another publisher as their sales and marketing director, but I was also writing for them. I thought [the plays] were a little bit dumbed down and twee, and I had an idea for a West Side Story but featuring cats and dogs. I found Tom through a teacher at my daughter's school and we spent about six months writing our first piece [Paws and Claws]. We really enjoyed it and people were telling us it was good, so we went for it.

HC: What was the gap you were trying to fill within school musicals provision?

TK: What I have always felt is that in so many of the scripts written for children, the characters aren't necessarily interesting enough and there aren't always enough speaking parts. I like the idea that anyone who's in a production feels a part of it.

MC: By the time a child is eight or so, their musical taste is starting to get quite sophisticated. I felt that we needed to write songs and produce them in a way that meant they would never be embarrassing. If a child has to sing some slightly ill-conceived song produced in a way that sounds like it's from 1978 (and not in a good way), I think you can really put children off music. Combining scripts with depth with meaningful characters and songs that are great fun, memorable and in no way embarrassing – that's what we set out to do.

HC: How has the pandemic affected your company and what changes have you made?

MC: In February or March, usually our period for selling big end-of-year shows, business dried up almost overnight. I would say that until late September, we had almost no sales. But Tom created these incredible home resources for drama, so we gave a lot of material away to make sure that children were still able to enjoy singing and drama at home.

In the Autumn, we started to say to people that they could do this, albeit differently. Moving into October, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. In November, we've pretty much taken the same amount of money that we took last November.

TK: Niki Davies, who does a lot of writing for us and is one of the directors, created some strong bubble versions of nativities she's already done. They've been really useful – just adapting the material to fit the situation.

MC: Because there are three of us plus a lot of freelancers, we are quite agile. We very quickly looked at what teachers were going to need and just moved into that.

HC: Do you think schools should be prioritising musicals as part of their recovery curriculum?

TK: I don't know if they should be, but obviously we'd love them to. Not just from a business perspective, but because we absolutely believe wholeheartedly in the benefits of the arts to a child's education.

MC: Children have been affected [by the pandemic] in the same way as adults. You hear so many children saying that they didn't learn anything in the September term and that it was difficult. Singing and drama are a release for children. Not having those things in a child's life leaves a gap.

We're just looking forward to schools getting back to normality, where they can fully embrace a wide-ranging curriculum and children are allowed to sing, dance, act, and interact fully.

HC: What projects have you got coming up?

MC: We've got two really great new musicals coming. We have an adaptation of Aladdin, which Tom and I wrote during lockdown – we've used some great Arabic textures and sounds and it's very evocative. Then we've got an amazing piece by Niki Davies called The Minotaur. We'll also do another songbook for complete assemblies. Then, we'll get to February or March and we'll have to start thinking about Christmas again, which is bizarre.

HC: Finally, what one piece of advice would you give to teachers putting on a production now?

TK: If you're filming a production, there's a lot of software out there. Lots of it is free and it's very easy to use now, so it's just about giving yourself enough time and enough practice with the camera.

MC: If something goes wrong or someone forgets something, you can record it again. But then, very often with [something like] a nativity, the things that go wrong are the charm of it.

TK: Also, making sure that every parent gets a chance to see their child on screen is probably a good starting point, I would have thought.

The School Musicals Co is now in 30 countries, with its version of Peter Pan – Pantastic – having reached over 2,000 schools.

www.theschoolmusicalscompany.com