In this week’s issue of The Stage, you’ll find a special 8-page guide to musical theatre training, more of which below. Also this week:
- Duncan Turner looks at the launch of new national digital radio station theJazz.
- Sylvester McCoy, about to start as the Fool in the RSC’s King Lear, looks back on a career that has spanned “everything except ballet”.
- Liz Thomas previews the weekend’s Eurovision: Making Your Mind Up, with background information on each of the hopeful UK entries.
- Designer Timothy Bird, fresh from winning the Olivier for his designs for Sunday in the Park with George, talks about his new project, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
- Producer Charles Vance on the contribution that amateur theatre has made to the performing arts world.
Read on for some previews of the inside pages…
Our eight-page guide to musical theatre training has lots to offer. Royal Academy of Music headteacher Mary Hammond tells just how vital training is in all areas of entertainment:
“It’s true that you can learn an awful amount on the job, but equally, I think that any kind of training can give you an innate sense of what to do in order to have reserves to fall back on. What I find is that people are working steadily, it’s not difficult to work for four or five years after you leave, it’s having the skill to sustain it.”
Mountview’s head of musical theatre, Paul Sabey, talks about the school’s selection process and the training they provide, while How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? finalist Laura Sicurello talks about life after the show, and how her Mountview MA course in musical theatre is helping her:
Since September, I can’t believe how much I have learnt in such as a short time. I have no doubt about the move that I have made. Just in relation to my singing, I am learning techniques that I was blissfully unaware of before, things I’d never have known without the guidance of these excellent teachers. And I’ve never felt so fit in all my life.
Laura’s fellow finalist (and eventual winner), Connie Fisher, is a Mountview alumna — and we look at what her fellow graduates from the class of 2005 have been up to since.
He’s busy rehearsing to take up the role of the Fool opposite Ian McKellen’s King Lear, but Sylvester McCoy took some time to talk to Jeremy Austin about his career to date, and the approach he’s taking to the character under the directorship of Trevor Nunn.
It’s not quite the comedy relief fool. Every fool has comic relief in it, but this one is a bit nuts. It’s good to be played by someone who has comic baggage about them… For 30 or 40 years, I have been living off comedy and eccentricity, and in a way that’s what you can bring to the fool at the same time as the serious side. It is a great play. You can play on both things and bring them together, so you don’t see any of the joins.
The Stage is available in most branches of WH Smiths and many other leading newsagents every Thursday, priced £1.30. Subscription packages are also available.
Coming up in the next couple of weeks: Guides to postgraduate courses (March 22) and dance training (March 29).
