May 2010 Archives

I’ve found yet another shiny, new, full-time training alternative for those who want something intensely focused, small-scale enough to be personalised and taught by current working professionals in the West End and/or Broadway - as opposed to what some critics allege is on offer in some of the tried-and-tested drama schools.

American Musical Theatre Academy of London has been running 12-week Sunday courses for over -16s since 2008 using studio space at Sadler’s Wells.

Now AMTA has moved into spacious studios near Liverpool Street Station and its one-year full-time training course starts in September. AMTA’s founder is the dynamic, fast talking Kenneth Avery-Clark, Principal, Head of Singing and Creative Director. His course aims to be based on the American idea that you have to project yourself and that there are no opportunities in this industry for shrinking violets or people who can’t or won’t learn to act through their shyness.

Avery Clark, who came originally from Canada, is currently appearing in the West End production of Sweet Charity at Theatre Royal, Haymarket. - which is why I am interviewing him in the theatre’s empty stalls at lunch time.

He has 23 years experience in Musical Theatre and has shared the stage with Nathan Lane, Lee Evans, Elaine Paige, Elton John, Liza Minnelli, Cliff Richard, Girls Aloud, and Olivia Newton-John among others. He has appeared in the West End productions of The Drowsy Chaperone, The Producers, Ragtime and 125th Street and toured extensively in the US and Canada.

In addition Avery-Clark is a writer of both plays and music and is one of London’s leading vocal coaches, teaching privately as well as one day a week, on a BTEC course at Plumstead Manor School in South London.

“We insist on tutors, like me, who have ‘done it’ and are still ‘doing it’ because the students need to learn more than technique. They need to be helped to hone the right skills and attitude to work and I believe that it’s only current practitioners who can do that,” he says.

Of course, it isn’t the first time I’ve heard this line from start-up drama schools and I know it is anathema to some of the mainstream drama schools and their alumni. The last time I mentioned it, we broke the record for comments on this blog - so over to you when I’ve finished.

Avery-Clark is working with fellow Canadian Christie Miller, AMTA’s Managing Director and a professional life coach. His Head of Acting is Mark Goldthorp who will soon be on stage at Regent’s Park in Stephen Sondheim’s musical hit Into The Woods after having spent the past few years playing Nicky/Treckie in Avenue Q in the West End.

Lisa Donmall, who has appeared in several West End musicals including The Rat Pack, The Producers, Crazy for You, Sweet Charity, Cats, Anything Goes, My Fair Lady and Chicago is AMTA’s Head of Dance. Guest tutors include Will Barratt, currently appearing in Phantom of the Opera, and Alex Forster who spent three years in We Will Rock You and has toured Europe extensively as a principal dancer.

AMTA is looking for 20 students for its new course and is charging £9,000 per year which includes a ten-day trip to New York for training on Broadway. This undercuts much of the competition but, of course, because this is new and unaccredited, there is no entitlement to loans or grants and no scholarships. ‘But we shall be offering a payment plan’ says Avery-Clark who will be auditioning to fill places until August.

‘Training will be intensive with singing, dancing and acting every day with lots of one-to-one work,’ says Avery-Clark. ‘I aim to teach students that to succeed in the West End these days you have to be highly proficient at everything because musical theatre casts are typically much smaller than they used to be. It’s no good being “just” a dancer or singer. And they need to understand that every single person on stage could actually play almost any part.’ That, he asserts, requires a very specific training which ensures that students learn to manage themselves in every sense. It requires proactivity and confidence.

This week’s issue of The Stage has a 12-page supplement devoted to musical theatre training. See our In the Paper blog for more details. Also, we have a selection of musical theatre course listings available online.

Saturday was Dorothy day in more ways than one. While Danielle Hope was scampering off to the very bright lights of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Oz, I was watching some small children in Canterbury chorusing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ together for the first time.

These alternative Dorothys were the 3-7 year old boys and girls who attend Stagebugs, the junior section of Kent Youth Theatre, on Saturday mornings. First I had sat in with three smaller groups improvising the meetings with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion. Then they all came together for singing. No stars here, but a lot of solid development work and good teaching.

60 young people, an encouraging 20% of them boys, meet each week in term time (for three hours for the over 7s and an hour and a half for Stagebugs) at Kent College, an independent school on the outskirts of Canterbury. “I used to be a drama teacher in a maintained sector school in Canterbury,” says Richard Andrews, who runs KYT with his wife Jo and other staff, including a RADA trained actor and two drama students from University of Kent over the road. “My students wanted to do more drama out of school so I began this at the Alexandra Centre in Faversham nine years ago.”

KYT moved to Kent College last September. Older students work in the chapel which Kent College has imaginatively converted for mixed use as a 320-seat theatre with integral raking, lighting box and sizeable stage. Stagebugs are in a cosy English classroom and drama studio elsewhere on the campus. It is all well maintained and spotlessly clean.

“We concentrate mostly on acting with a lot of devised work as well as text based activities,” says Andrews, explaining that he began with the usual one hour each of singing, dancing and acting but has moved away from it. “Of course we do voice work and some singing, but not singing lessons as such and there are plenty of opportunities for dance lessons elsewhere if they want them.”

KYT Participants come from all over south and east Kent - from Ashford, Folkestone, Dover and Margate as well as from Canterbury. Andrews doesn’t advertise. Most of his students and their families hear about him via word of mouth and occasional features in the local paper - whose photographer had arrived on Saturday before I left and is clearly someone Andrews knows well.

And there was I thinking that leaked emails were the stuff of government back-stabbing subterfuge or spy novels. I am not at liberty to tell you where I got this information and have stashed my cloak and dagger on the corner of my desk. It has, as they say, ‘come to my attention’ that the dynamic and enterprising (and how - try following them on Twitter if you don’t believe me) Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds is offering the following work placements this year:

The Poor Solider (A Restoring the Repertoire production of a musical play by John O’Keeffe 1783) Directed by Colin Blumenau with musical direction by John Rigby. Overall dates June 14-July 3, 2010

• Lighting Designer - full responsibility
• Student Musician Placement Opportunity - instruments needed harpsichord, violin, flute, oboe, bassoon, clarinet to complement the company of actor/musicians.

George Barnwell (A Restoring the Repertoire production of a seminal early 18th century play by George Lillo) Directed by Colin Blumenau. Overall dates - September 6-October 16, 2010

• Assistant Director - full responsibility
• 2 Actors/understudies - full responsibility
• 2 ASM - full responsibility
• Set design/costume design Placement Opportunity

Mother Goose (Annual Christmas Pantomime) by Daniel O’Brien. Directed by Abigail Anderson with musical direction by Peter White. Overall dates - November 15, 2010-January 16, 2011

• ASM and crew - full responsibility
• Set building Placement Opportunity
• Design/Costume Design Placement Opportunity

Rural Tour (Title still to be confirmed - touring to Village Halls and Community Centres in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire) Directed by Abigail Anderson Overall dates - August 9-October 8, 2010

• ASM - full responsibility

Restoring the Repertoire Rehearsed Readings: One every month directed by various directors.

• 2 Actors per play
• Dramaturgy Student Placement Opportunity

The above list is exactly as it came to me, originally typed - one assumes - by someone at Theatre Royal BSE. It adds up to more than 20 opportunities. If I were a young performer or theatre professional I’d be on the phone immediately.

In a few weeks time it will all be happening in Kingston when the International Youth Arts Festival hits the ground from 2-11 July.

And it looks gloriously eclectic. A range of indoor and outdoor events will see just about every art-form showcased in the festival’s second year.

Supported by £20K of Arts Council England funding, this year’s programme has 100 events taking place across 9 venues in Kingston over a 10-day period.

Organised by Aniela Zaba, the Festival Director, alongside a group of talented young people, the programme includes visual art exhibitions, gospel concerts, band nights, dance shows and orchestras and theatre selected from Kingston, the UK and abroad.

Two more useful training books have arrived. One is a fresh look at monologues from Limelight Editions in Wisconsin and the other a reissued, updated old favourite from Methuen Drama.

Prudence Wright Holmes has been coaching actors for more than a quarter of a century having acted extensively herself in, for example, the film Sister Act and the original off-Broadway casts of Godspell and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All For You.

Her book Monologue Mastery: The Actor’s Guide to Selecting and Performing Monologues stresses that it’s a good idea to be original and not present the audition panel with something they’ve heard countless times before — although writing your own is a high-risk strategy because you probably aren’t a very talented writer. One of her lists at the back of the book is entitled “Monologues they never want to hear again” - good advice.

She is also strong - and very practical - on how to deliver the monologue once you’ve chosen it. I liked the list of action verbs and the sections about crying on cue, managing beats and the difference between stage and film monologues. The frequently asked questions which deal with matters such as what you should wear to an audition are spot-on, although I was amused by the ultra-conservative, very American, cautious approach to dealing with ‘profanity’ in monologues.

Theatre Games: A New Approach to Drama Training, first published in 1977, is aimed primarily at drama teachers in schools and higher education and at students, although the general reader stands to learn a lot about the processes which actors use to develop a final performance.

For example, Barker favoured the use of non-existent languages (not Gibberish) such as mock-Russian to help background actors to be vibrant in, for example, party scenes. He had interesting ideas too about how to apply and develop Stanislavski’s “circle of concentration” idea.

There is a fair amount of theory in this well-written, readable classic amongst the practical exercises - but it is in effect an extended masterclass on paper and there is nothing ‘heavy’ about it.

The new edition comes with an introduction by Dick McCaw, Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Drama at Royal Holloway University of London, who knew and worked with Barker for the last twenty years of his life. With the book is a DVD-ROM which includes video footage showing Barker using the games with students.

I quite often hear about new MA opportunities and there really are some original ones out there these days to meet a very wide range of interests and approaches. The latest to reach me is the new collaborative MA in Theatre for Young Audiences which Rose Bruford is offering in partnership with Unicorn Theatre. It is due to start this autumn subject to final validation by the University of Manchester.

“There are three or four MAs of this kind available in the US and there’s one in Seoul but I know of nothing else like this in the UK,” says Tony Graham, artistic director at Unicorn Theatre explaining that he and Rose Bruford’s new principal Michael Earley have agreed on a multi-faceted, ongoing collaboration between their respective organisations. Graham sees the joint MA as symbolising the heart of the partnership.

“Young people’s theatre has changed hugely in thirty years,” Graham observes, “and it’s always contentious. No one has all the answers so there is a strong sense in which we are all learning together.”

Graham and Earley are hoping that within three years there will be 20/25 people on the course each year but they will probably start with fewer for the pilot year. Access is open to students of all cultures from anywhere in the world and the tuition will be international too with international training placements. It can be done full-time in one year or part-time over two years.

They are expecting a wide range of students including, perhaps directors, designers and researchers as well as performers and other practitioners.

“We need some good research in this branch of the industry” says Graham, “because although we all know young people’s theatre works there is very little properly presented evidence to demonstrate how and why it’s important.”

Anyone interested in applying should contact Richard Sadler at Rose Bruford immediately. 020 8308 2691 richard.sadler@bruford.ac.uk

I’m on the 17th floor of Broadgate Tower near Liverpool Street Station in what must be one of the most dramatic venues in London. A vast (think nave in Westminster Abbey) open, silver floored, empty space with massive plate glass windows on three sides. That means that looking east you can see beyond O₂ and the river towards Bexley and into Kent. In the other direction past the London Eye and upriver you can clearly see London’s western suburbs towards Heathrow. And because, unlike New York, we don’t have many high rise buildings in London, from here the views are uninterrupted so it’s like a 3D aerial map.

But, actually, I’m not here for the views so, with great difficulty, I have to drag my eyes from them. I am a guest of Theatre Centre. This is the party to announce and celebrate the 2010 Brian Way and Adrienne Benham Awards and there are many familiar faces here from the world of young people’s theatre. Good to touch base with, for instance Daryl Beeton and Akua Obeng-Frinpong from Kazzum, Judith Kilvington of Graeae and Nigel Townsend of Y Touring.

The Brian Way Award is a £6,000 prize for a new play which has been professionally produced in the last twelve months.

First we hear duologues, beautifully read by two actors, from the five shortlisted plays: Blackberry Trout Face by Laurence Wilson (20 Stories High), Breathing Country by Ben Musgrave (Y Touring Theatre Co), Cosmos by Peter Rumney (Dragon Breath Theatre), Rigged by Ashmeed Sohoye (Theatre Centre), The Monster Under the Bed (Polka Theatre) and Wasteland by Laura Thomas (New Perspectives).

Of these I have seen only Rigged, an impressive piece which I reviewed for The Stage last year, so I am most interested to hear the extracts from the other plays. Do post a comment here if you’ve seen any of the others.

The award went to Laurence Wilson for Blackberry Trout Face, a play full of vision and insight about a family on the brink of collapse. The judges (Isobel Hawson. Bola Agbaje. Darren Hart and last year’s winner, Douglas Maxwell) found it ‘unpredictable and riveting’ with ‘sunshine and sparkle’ as the three main characters ‘built their bridges and sewed their family together.’

Wilson, who had two further productions at the Liverpool Everyman in 2009 at the same time as Blackberry Trout Face was touring small theatres, schools and other venues in the north-west, promised to use the money to write more plays for young people. He joked - except that it’s serious - that one venue he knows was criticised for mounting too few ‘proper’ plays: only devised theatre and young people’s stuff. Ouch.

The newer Adrienne Benham Award goes to a playwright rather than a play and is for a promising new writer who then gets some ‘seed funding’ and the opportunity to develop a play for young people. This year’s winner was Paula B Stanic.

I take plays for young audiences very seriously indeed and review dozens of them every year. And that’s a privilege because I see a great deal of fine work. Nevertheless the perception of young people’s theatre as an inferior genre still lingers in some ignorant quarters so it’s a good job we have the Brian Way and Adrienne Benham awards to help refute that by celebrating and rewarding the best.

There was one day last week which found me reflecting, not for the first time, on what a marvellous, varied and exciting job I’ve got. Within the space of a mere 15 hours (and I went to bed in between) I attended two very different arts education events.

The first was on Wednesday evening (the first evening this year which has actually felt slightly balmy as summer’s meant to) at St Paul’s Covent Garden. There, amongst all those evocative actors’ memorials and the slightly distracting noise from the piazza outside, Orpheus Foundation Symphonia played a cracking concert of Mendelssohn and Beethoven.

This is an intercollegiate orchestra which exists to provide a stepping stone into professional life for talented students at the London music conservatoires. Marc Corbett-Weaver, the artistic director, founded it in 2005. Judi Dench is the Foundation’s very enthusiastic and supportive patron. Its lead sponsor is the MariaMarina Foundation and there is a long list of other partners - along with a friends group boasting 140 members. There has been a recent drive to persuade supporters to sponsor twelve orchestra chairs at £1500 each with match funding from MariaMarina. The last three were ‘sold’ during the concert interval.

The orchestra, conducted by Thomas Carroll, achieved a rich vibrant sound like the best quality dark chocolate. And although I thought Carroll was a little over ambitious with his tempi in the first three works Tamsin Waley-Cohen gave a stunning performance of the Mendelssohn violin concerto and the final work - Beethoven’s seventh symphony was a real tour de force. The brass in general, and the horns in particular, were especially fine. All in all it was very exciting to see a group of young players undergoing such high quality professional development.

Then, on Thursday, morning I found myself trotting along Tooley Street in the sunshine to attend a totally different ‘education’ performance at Unicorn Theatre.

Oily Cart and aerial theatre company Ockham’s Razor have revived Something in the Air which first ran at the Manchester International Festival in 2009. It is a piece of interactive physical theatre, specifically created for young people with profound and multiple learning difficulties or an autistic spectrum disorder.

The set is on Unicorn’s main stage which has a complex rig which takes three days to erect with pulleys and pods which have, I gather, to be passed by a fairground equipment inspector before use. I watch six children - the maximum audience - raised in double ‘flying’ seats with their carers. All are engaged, some with shining faces, some vociferous and some quiet and apparently unresponsive but attentive. Haunting music, coloured shapes, mirrors, balls, songs and some thrilling acrobatic work by Ockham’s Razor surrounds the audience who have been carefully prepared for the performance so that there are no shocks. It’s a thrilling and very evocative show by anyone’s standards although the most moving part for me is watching the faces or the participating children each on his (they were all boys) own journey.

Something in the Air is at Unicorn for the rest of this week and touring until the end of May.

I left Unicorn Theatre thinking l how lucky I am to have seen and heard two such diverse performances so close together (and on my way to a third - of which more in another blog).Then I got a call from the Orpheus Foundation’s marketing man and discover that actually there is a link between these two events. Orpheus Foundation has a partnership with Unicorn and has run education events in collaboration with it. Small world, this performing arts education business.