No, I’m not heading back to New York yet again, at least not just yet (though a colleague I met at the Barbican last night was surprised to see me: “I thought you’d moved there!”, she said). Instead, I’m referring to th Christmas in New York show that takes place at the Lyric Theatre this Sunday, and I’m planning on taking special care when I try to get there.
I loved it last year, despite the fact that less than three hours before I went to see it I had written off my car. It was entirely my own fault – I’d been to a matinee at the Unicorn Theatre in Tooley Street, near London Bridge, and parked my car on a side street. When I came to pull out again into Tooley Street again, I thought it was a one-way street – except that it wasn’t, and I was brutally sideswiped by an oncoming bus hurtling up in the other direction. My first thought, after examining the tangled mess of what my car (but fortunately not me!) had become, was how was I going to get into the West End to see Christmas in New York.
But I got there. And for two blissful hours, it took my mind off what the catastrophe that might have been. Yes, I shuddered when I replayed the moment of impact in my mind in the days that followed; but for now, I was transported, in another sense entirely, to another world – hurtling instead, across the Atlantic, to my favourite city in the world from a seat in one of my favourite theatres, to hear songs performed by some of my favourite West End performers.
The best part amongst so much familiarity – a recipe always designed to breed content – was that so much of the material that I was hearing was brand-new. The mission of the Notes from New York series, founded in 2003, has always been to introduce new, usually transatlantic, musical voices to West End ears, and in a world where jukebox musicals of old pop hits and revivals of old classics largely reign, it has from its inception provided a vital signpost to the future of musical theatre. Unfortunately, most of that future is still being signalled mainly in New York rather than London, but here was proof positive, if only for one night at a time, that new songs were still being written for the theatre.
And in the few years that the project has been running, we’ve been duly catching up in London with news shows like Avenue Q, Caroline, or Change, Wicked and The Drowsy Chaperone travelling here from Broadway with various degrees of success. We still, however, need to nurture and promote more homegrown talent; and that’s where Not(es) from New York came in last year, turning the focus away from America and bringing it closer to home by featuring the work of local composers Grant Olding and Charles Miller.
Grant, in turn, wrote a Christmas song specially for last year’s show; and this year, he has been part of a judging panel, alongside musical director David Randall, performer Anna-Jane Casey and yours truly, to choose the winner of a competition to find and premiere another new song by a composer whose work has previously been unheard in the West End.
In order to grow some mighty oaks, we need to start planting an acorn or two. This is a small step, but it could be an important one that allows a new musical writer to get a moment in the spotlight. It was, after all, thanks to the now-defunct Vivian Ellis musical theatre prize that Charles Hart was first spotted, and given his chance to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber as lyricist to The Phantom of the Opera.
The competition attracted over 150 entries (fortunately, we didn’t have to listen to them all; David thoughtfully did that for us, and finally whittled down the selection to five that Julie Atherton and Paul Spicer, who have been the performers driving the series, performed for us personally. The winning entry is Michael Bruce’s ‘Children’). So there’s a hunger and appetite out there to write songs for the theatre. And, as well as avoiding car crashes of the sort that I experienced this time last year, we need to avoid making car-crash theatre, too, by relying too much on recycling the past, as was catastrophically demonstrated by the immediate failure of Desperately Seeking Susan that closes next Saturdy after a run of exactly a month. Christmas in New York provides another opportunity to start looking to the future – and begin a musical Christmas for ourselves.
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