Supplementary memorandum submitted by
Theatre Royal Stratford East
POINT OF
VIEW
This submission deals with the questions raised
by the CMS Committee from the point of view of an East End theatre,
the Theatre Royal Stratford East, which has a famous but sporadic
history in musical theatre since 1953. Since 1997 it has been
carrying out an intensive research-and-development project into
the creation of new musicals with an emphasis on contemporary
Urban Music. The main aim of the project has been the development
of musical artists new to the theatre in order to create shows,
which will in turn attract new, principally young, audiences.
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Theatre Royal Stratford East's Musical
Theatre Background
2. Urban Music and Musical Theatre
3. Stratford East's Musical Theatre Development
Project
4. Successful Urban Musicals at Stratford
East
5. The Commercial Response
6. The Arts Council Response
7. The DCMS and Wider Government Involvement
INTRODUCTION
The recent crisis at the Bridewell Theatre and
the National Youth Music Theatre are the tips of an iceberg. The
iceberg is the deep-seated underlying problems of the lack of
development since the 80s of new British musicals, ie ones with
original music, specially written for the show.
This problem has artistic, educational, social
and financial ramifications and therefore the solution lies in
an imaginative and determined effort to achieve joined-up thinking
between artistic quangos, subsidised arts organisations, both
the commercial theatre and music industries, several voluntary
umbrella agencies and several government departments, some of
whom may not realise they play a part indirectly in this issue.
That is a grand claim; let me justify it as
briefly as I am able. To do so I need to start at Stratford East's
grass roots.
1. Theatre Royal Stratford East's Musical
Theatre Background
I am in my 25th year as artistic director of
the Theatre Royal Stratford East, where Joan Littlewood's company
Theatre Workshop arrived 50 years ago and caused a revolution
in British theatre, alongside the Royal Court Theatre, principally
by giving opportunities to many talented working class writers
and actors of the kind previously excluded from theatre.
Among her wide-ranging theatre work there were
a handful of musicals which were hailed as the start of a British
musical revival. For example in 1963 Joan created Oh, What
A Lovely War! which was a view of the First World War from
the trenches, and which hugely influenced documentary theatre
and inspired the internationally admired Theatre In Education
movement, in which Britain lead the world for the next 30 years.
Another example which is significant in what
I wish to demonstrate was Lionel Bart's Fings Ain't Wot They
Used T'Be. Lionel was a raw talent who couldn't write music
down. When the show went to the West End there had to be a two-page
glossary in the programme of cockney slang to explain it to the
typical West End theatre-goer.
In my own time at Theatre Royal the West End
has cherry-picked our safer compilation shows which used already
popular music, such as Five Guys Named Moe, a tribute to
Louis Jordan's music, or Unforgettable, a tribute to Nat
King Cole, or A Star Is Torn, a tribute to eight famous
women singers.
It must be mentioned here that Cameron Mackintosh
who transferred Five Guys Named Moe to the West End, behaved
in an exemplary fashion and offered Stratford East a deal of unheard-of
generosity. We received one-third of his own earnings on the show.
He simply said we had taken the original risk and so deserved
it. Would it was ever thus!
The world-wide profits kept Stratford East going
as a lively, risk-taking producing theatre in the early nineties
at a time when regional theatres were hard pushed to keep open
let alone take risks. Unfortunately it was only after the Moe
money had been spent on sheer survival that the Theatre Royal
developed its own "Big Idea" for the development of
new musical theatre in 1997.
The idea was to develop new musicals out of
the contemporary music, known as Urban Music, which had been popular
by 1997 for at least 20 years. The Theatre Royal Stratford East,
with its famous history in musical theatre and its deep roots
in its own urban community was well placed to achieve this. Allow
me to amplify this point.
The central plank of Stratford East's success
in the past 50 years has been its inter-relationship with its
varied local communities, drawing on their talents, ideas and
concerns. Occasionally this relationship directly produced shows
such as Steaming which couldn't be more local, set as it
was in a local Turkish bath, and yet it went on to the West End,
Broadway and Australia and was made into a film.
Newham in which the Theatre Royal is situated
is the borough in Britain with the highest percentage of ethnic
minorities who are now in fact a majority of 61% of the population.
It has the highest percentage of young people in its population
and the biggest turnover of residents of any borough. It is also
one of the most deprived boroughs in the country, a position aggravated
by its unaccountable exclusion from being named an inner city
borough by the Government.
These factors combined allow Newham to claim
to be on the front-line of social change. It also happens that
if any area in Britain can claim to be the cradle of UK hip-hop
music, then it is the East End. The Theatre Royal read the writing
on the wall and seven years ago began a process of developing
the Urban Musical, while not excluding or disparaging the creation
of new musicals in the classic Broadway tradition which The Bridewell,
the National Youth Music Theatre, Mercury Musical Developments
and several regional theatres all champion.
2. Urban Music and Musical Theatre
The genre now called Urban Music includes an
extraordinary range of musical forms which are continually evolving
and fusing. These include R'n'B, hip-hop, rap, basement, garage
and bashment among other forms. Like so much of popular music
its roots are in black culture. However with the rich mix of races
in Britain's inner cities, culturally diverse fusions of musical
styles are inevitably happening, notably with Asian music from
which not just populist forms like Bhangra and Bollywood are appropriated
to add to the mix but also elements of Indian classical music.
The mixes in Urban Music have no barriers in its eclecticism.
It is greatly to the advantage of the originality
of British pop music that this mixing of styles of music from
different racial backgrounds happens more readily in London than
in New York. There is the advantage too that no country has the
particular mix of cultures that Britain has from its colonial
history, and so the contemporary musicals developed in Britain
will by definition be different to those developed in the USA.
This exciting fusion of culturally diverse talents
has contributed much to the British pop music and club music scenes
and to the distinctive British successes in the worlds of fashion
and film. In the performing arts contemporary dance has been inspired
by new musical fusions, but the world of theatre has remained
largely untouched by them.
When the Theatre Royal began its research-and-development
process into using British Urban Music in musicals, we were told
by two leading West End producers that this wasn't possible to
do because it simply wasn't "musical theatre music".
The same was said early last century about ragtime, then later
about jazz and yet again about rock and roll. There was always
a delay between these musical forms coming through in popular
music and finally being imported into musical theatre. There was
for example a 14-year gap between rock and roll dominating the
hit parade in 1955 and the staging of the first successful rock
musical Hair in 1968.
However there has now been a 25 year lag between
the rise of rap and hip-hop in the pop charts and the staging
of a UK Urban Music show on the West End stage. We are still waiting,
which seems to indicate a serious problem for the current and
future popularity of the musical as a popular art form.
Why is this? It's partly the usual historical
reasons. Powerful commercial producers tend to be middle-aged,
white males who don't connect with new music. Their audiences
tend to be over 40, partly because only by that age can many afford
West End prices and they are often nostalgic for the music of
their youth.
However there are particular reasons why the
new Urban Music has taken longer to be accepted in theatre. One
is that, unlike traditional musicals, which depend on a combination
of live musicians, technology is central to the new music. So
there has to be a major re-think and much experimentation for
creating a new musical theatre, but one which will probably be
as dependent as ever on the eternal dramatic verities of character
creation and good story-telling.
A second factor would be that Urban Music is
dominated by black and Asian artists, but there are next to no
black or Asian producers or directors in positions of power. Perhaps
more important at this stage of development though would be the
fact that there are comparatively few black and Asian writers
and composers concentrating on musical theatre. Noticeably none
of the famous musical writing teams in the USA in the last century
were black, although the original sources of the new American
music were primarily black and to a lesser extent Jewish. There
are though isolated examples of change in British musical theatre,
which need to be pro-actively encouraged.
3. Stratford East's Musical Theatre Development
Project
With all these issues in mind, Theatre Royal
Stratford East began in 1999 a series of annual, month-long, full-time
workshops to experiment in using all manner of contemporary popular
music in theatre. The participants included playwrights who had
already worked in theatre but were interested in writing the book
and/or lyrics for a musical. Most of the composers involved had
never worked in musical theatre before. They worked in many different
musical traditions but there was gradually year by year a greater
concentration on contemporary Urban Music because it became obvious
that was the most difficult and possibly eventually the most productive
style of music to incorporate into musicals. As one of the West
End producers who thought the task was impossible added, "but
if you crack it you'll make a fortune".
The courses are lead by two lecturers from
the Tisch School at New York University, which has the only university
course in the world which teaches the art of writing for musical
theatre. It's a two-year, post-graduate course and it is very
expensive to do and of course to live in New York. Hardly any
of those doing the Stratford East's month-long courses would be
academically qualified enough or rich enough to do the New York
two-year course. The young Lionel Bart would have been neither
for example. The lecturers concerned are excited by the diversity
of the participants we find for them and they say there is no
equivalent producing theatre in New York concentrating on developing
contemporary urban musicals as Stratford East is.
One of the biggest hurdles was contacting rap
and hip-hop artists and interesting them in the possibilities
of musical theatre in which there were no role-model artists or
shows for them to identify with, but contacting artists has become
gradually easier as word got round. After six years, over 100
writers and composers have taken part in Stratford East's extremely
practical courses. Approximately 60% of them have been black with
20% Asian and 20% white.
4. Successful Urban Musicals at Stratford
East
Progressing those artists the theatre is most
interested in developing from the annual workshops is a very expensive
business, and Stratford East has been supported by several organisations
to do this, notably the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, the Cameron
Mackintosh Foundation, the Hollick Foundation, the Follett Foundation,
the Gulbenkian Foundation, Unity Theatre Trust, Equity Trust and
the TUC However the underpinning of public subsidy from the London
Borough of Newham, the Arts Council and the Association of London
Government, provides the essential support necessary to the core
funding of the Theatre Royal, and allowing it in the first four
years of the project, when the theatre was closed for Lottery—supported
renovations, to concentrate on musical theatre development. An
associate producer was appointed to organise the development process,
and honorariums were paid to a small group of mostly young, mostly
black artists to advise the theatre and direct the workshop shows.
An excellent example of a composing and writing
duo who have been developed in this period are the poet Hope Massiah
and the composer Delroy Murray who both graduated from Stratford
East's annual Musical Theatre Writing Workshop four years ago
and were then offered a commission for a 20 minute show, which
was workshopped to enable the writers to see professional actors
and musicians performing their work for the first time. This was
followed up with a commission to write an eighty-minute show which
toured the East End, and finally they became the first black,
words-and-music team to write a traditional British pantomime,
but with a Caribbean and Urban Music flavour. This was enthusiastically
received by the Stratford East audience, which is the most multi-racial
of any British theatre. Stratford East has now commissioned this
team to write an original musical and another pantomime.
The most radical and significant example to
date of what Stratford East is trying to achieve is the production
it staged in May 2003 called Da Boyz. It was a modern version
of the 1930's Broadway Show The Boys from Syracuse by Rodgers
and Hart. It was the first time that permission had been given
to update into up-to-the-minute Urban Music the music of a classic
Broadway show still in copyright. This exciting opportunity came
about because the enterprising Rodgers and Hammerstein Organisation
recognised the high seriousness with which Stratford East was
approaching the process. This was a coup for British Theatre.
The music was updated by two young East Enders
of nineteen and twenty-two and the show was directed and designed
by the international theatre and opera director, ULTZ. The main
aim of Stratford East's Urban Musical Theatre project was to connect
with young people who wouldn't normally go to the theatre. This
show did that highly successfully because it was their music and
because it was set in the East End today. The cast were principally
rappers and hip-hoppers drawn from auditions throughout the East
End, and many were graduates of the Theatre Royal's Youth Theatres.
The young people were in effect the style gurus and everything
was done to make young people feel they owned the show.
Techniques for marketing were drawn, with EMI's
advice, from how the commercial music business connected with
young people, and this had excellent results. Young offenders
teams, mentoring groups and youth clubs from tough areas booked
young people in and many of the young people re-booked to come
again individually, breaking that invisible but daunting barrier
many young people feel exists between them and theatre.
Not only did the show achieve this social aim,
which accords with central government's and the Arts Council's
policies on social inclusion, but the show was also acknowledged
with a whole page report in the New York Times and another
whole page in the American entertainment bible "Variety"
hailing it as a "break-through in international music theatre"
and calling the Theatre Royal a "pioneering theatre".
5. The Commercial Response
There was an unusual response from the commercial
sector. The West End understandably showed no interest at all
in a musical which had a cast of 30 rappers and hip-hoppers and
which could well not appeal to their current audiences. However,
two American TV network companies (HBO and MTV) a British independent
TV production company (Blast Productions), Channel Four and BBC
TV have all shown enthusiastic interest, ranging from making a
film from the idea but not of the stage show itself, or making
a documentary of the process of creating our next hip-hop show
and then screening the theatrical production that comes out of
it.
There have also been ideas of creating American
versions set in and using talents from black inner city areas
like Harlem or South Chicago, or creating a South African version
for the Market Theatre Johannesburg.
This is very different to the common pattern
since the Second World War where commercial producers would pick
up a successful, regional, subsidised production to take to the
West End. After a run there the show might tour at home and abroad,
and then be made available for other regional theatre producers,
followed by the release of amateur rights. Urban Musicals might
prove to be a different genre demanding a different process, but
some may eventually work in the conventional exploitation process
outlined here.
One can't help surmising though that there has
ultimately to be a breakthrough of the new Urban Music into commercial
theatre, and that the West End cannot just rely on new musicals
developed in the mainstream Broadway classic tradition in which
there is little enough support for development anyway, as colleagues
have reported to the committee. It would be against the pattern
of history if West End theatre simply skipped a popular genre
of music, which is the biggest-selling commercial music in the
world today.
6. The Arts Council Response
The CMS committee asked those organisations
which gave oral evidence about their access to and treatment by
the Arts Council
Stratford East's experience of access with the
Arts Council is very different to those organisations interviewed
primarily perhaps because Stratford East has long been a regularly
funded organisation. We have no difficulty gaining access to Arts
Council officers at all levels and in several departments. We
have frequent discussions with them and have gained much valuable
advice from them. This process has probably been much aided by
the fact that over the last 30 years I have served on ten Arts
Council committees, which may be more than any other British artist
has done.
The main reason why I have been asked to serve
on so many committees is that Stratford East has for 50 years
had at the heart of what it does social issues, such as education,
training, accessibility and multi-culturalism. However the Arts
Council did not value Joan Littlewood's artistic work and only
in the eighties, long after she had left, did the Arts Council
appreciate Stratford East's work, when in fact they were gradually
adopting her social values themselves.
Unfortunately over the last two years since
our theatre building re-opened relations with the Arts Council
have been rockier, as the direct result of an ill-handled, Lottery-funded,
re-building project. The tragic result of this situation has been
the recent abrupt discontinuation of the musical theatre research-and-development
and the delay of a new musical from this year until the next financial
year.
Stratford East's extensive renovation project,
largely funded by the Arts Council and administered by Newham
Council, was planned for a 15-month period but the time was constantly
extended until it reached four years. By the time of re-opening
two years ago the extended closure had had a disastrous effect
on audience numbers with the majority of those on the theatre's
mailing list not returning, except for the pantomime. The situation
has improved considerably in 2003 but not soon enough to prevent
a financial crisis in August 2002, which led to the Arts Council
placing the Theatre Royal into the preliminary stages of a scheme
called Recovery.
This is a three-year scheme designed to help
arts organisations in financial trouble to re-assess themselves
and make radical changes if necessary to find a way to survive
within a prescribed amount of subsidy. Many organisations that
have gone through Lottery building projects have got into immediate
financial trouble and been put into the Recovery scheme, when
it has been discovered the original projections for revenue needs
proved unsound. However no organisation suffered as long an extended
closed period as Stratford East.
So far in the preliminary eighteen months before
it is decided if Stratford East will be accepted onto the Recovery
scheme next April, 2004 some of the Arts Council paid consultants
have been of real value in improving the Theatre Royal's money-earning
capacity and its financial management. However just when we had
on-stage the show Da Boyz, hailed as an international musical
theatre breakthrough in May 2003, the Arts Council decided not
to award the £200,000 interim money that was indicated as
possible for this financial year (2003-04). This decision has
meant the closing down of our whole musical theatre development
project, and the laying-off of personnel involved, just as it
was about to take off in a big way. It has hindered too the commercial
exploration of what we have already achieved.
The Recovery process is intended as a tough
re-structuring programme but I am personally mystified that it
should include abandoning the research-and-development process
that could possibly lift the Theatre Royal out of its financial
problems and make a real-break through for British theatre generally.
It feels like a repeat of the situation in Joan Littlewood's time
when she was not backed to carry out her vision of theatre's future.
Even if Stratford East can find a way to rescue
some of its development process the exigencies of operating inside
the grant allocation already set for 2004-06 means the Theatre
Royal could not afford to do more than two Urban Music musicals
over the next three years, and only then if it finds the money
both to develop them and to hit its fund-raising targets for its
core activities. The Arts Council believes that Stratford East
gets sufficient money compared to "like theatres in London"
and it must concentrate on cutting its cloth according to the
subsidy already determined for the next three years. The Theatre
Royal believes there is no such thing as a "like theatre
in London", which has Stratford East's particular combination
of local demography and the developed ability to create new musicals.
The Arts Council has declined to treat the Theatre Royal as a
special case worthy of extra investment, even though it is also
at the heart of the Thames Gateway, the biggest development site
in Europe and within 10 minutes walk of the proposed Olympic stadium.
Regarding financial benefits, it is worth mentioning
here that Cameron Mackintosh's accountants calculated that taxes
on the money earned nationally and internationally from Five
Guys Named Moe paid back to the Treasury the equivalent of
all the money the Theatre Royal had been given as subsidy from
national and local government sources in the previous 10 years,
apart from giving Stratford East four financially healthy years
of adventurous innovation.
It's only fair to add here that there is another
other theatre company which is developing the expertise to create
musicals using Urban Music. The admired and long-established black
touring company, NITRO, has carried out several years of exploration
and is staging its first full-scale rap and hip-hop musical, Slamdunk,
next year for a five-month spring tour of England. Such has been
its popularity with booking theatres already, from being seen
at an Arts Council showcase as part of its Eclipse initiative,
that it may well tour again in the autumn.
However, on currently planned subsidy NITRO
can only produce one major musical a year and Stratford East is
struggling to do even that. This is not an adequate output to
ensure that Britain stays ahead in creating urban musicals and
reaps the artistic and financial rewards that will otherwise go
to the USA.
The main aims of the Arts Council's current policy
statement, "Ambitions for the Arts", are to advance
the causes of multi-culturalism, of innovation in the arts and
of involving young people with the arts. All three causes can
be pro-actively advanced by involving artists new to the theatre,
particularly ethnic minority ones, in the creation of new Urban
Musicals, which would then be staged to attract a young audience.
7. The DCMS And Wider Government Involvement
With regard to the Committee's questions on
ability to achieve access to the DCMS the Theatre Royal Stratford
East has excellent relations with several officers at the DCMS
and finds them always ready to discuss ideas and offer advice.
The Secretary of State for the DCMS, Tessa Jowell,
has invited me to bring in a few theatre and music practitioners
in January 2004 to discuss a comment I made at a conference to
the effect that to involve disaffected young people in the arts
the best place to start is with the art forms like Urban Music
with which they are already engaged. All manner of grass-roots,
community arts organisations have found that Urban Music is the
best art form to use as a first point of contact, whether one
is simply trying to re-involve young people in society or lead
them back into education or involve them with the theatre.
Many of these community arts, and in particular
music organisations, are supported by the Arts Council and/or
the DfES' Youth Music, but all of them could do significantly
more work if they were adequately and regularly funded, which
they are not.
There has been much research already done into
the wider artistic, social, and educational benefits which the
arts could bring if supported more, and the Arts Council, the
DCMS and the DfES are all devoting much time, imagination and
resources to these matters. I would only like to point out here
a couple of examples of how the lack of new musicals using contemporary
Urban Music has opened up gaps in what should be a continuous
loop of give-and-take between the educational and artistic experience
of young people.
Urban Music by its nature can be composed acoustically
on street corners, or with minimum equipment in make-shift studios
or bedrooms, but these wonderful participatory opportunities are
rarely taken up inside schools. It is well-known that an art form
that readily involves young people can be used in the teaching
of other subjects e.g. the writing of rap lyrics, which has as
many rules to learn as does blank verse, could be used in the
teaching of literacy. One of the DCMS' Creative Partnership zones,
the one in Birmingham has centred its work on Urban Music, with
much success.
Another gap in the natural give-and-take there
should be between arts and education, and one closer to the CMS
Committee's immediate subject, is thrown up by the fact that enterprising
teachers who produce the school musical have to fall back on the
old-fashioned, often excellent, classic musicals like Annie,
Oliver or Grease. Young people can enjoy doing these
shows immensely and learn a great deal from the experience of
being in them. However being restricted to these musicals means
that the whole school is also indirectly learning that theatre
is an old-fashioned activity intended for their parent's and grandparent's
generations. Many teachers in inner-city schools in particular
are aware how they could involve a wider range of young people
in a production if participants could use their rapping, hip-hopping
and dj-ing skills.
The Gulbenkian Foundation has recently given
the Theatre Royal Stratford East a £4,000 grant to explore
the feasibility of developing a package of video and written material
for schools to do their own version of Da Boyz, the music
for which would have to be up-dated constantly by the students
themselves because the range and the fusions in musical styles
change so rapidly these days.
If this could be achieved, and permission then
given by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organisation, schools would
have the opportunity to study how Shakespeare took the story of
a Roman comedy to create The Comedy Of Errors which became
a thirties Broadway musical, The Boys From Syracuse, which
in turn became Da Boyz in 2003. They can then, with due
regard for the laws of drama, which they will have learnt about
in this process, and due regard for the expertise and brilliance
of Rodgers and Hart's score and lyrics, stage their show, which
can be set in their hometown and be up-to-the-minute musically.
I hope this submission helps illustrate how
the progression of musical theatre, to bring full theatrical,
social and educational benefits, depends on achieving full joined-up
thinking both inside the Arts Council and across government departments
such as the DCMS and the DfES. All these organisations are working
hard at achieving this joined-up thinking on many other subjects.
It would be good if musical theatre could be taken into the fold.
It is of course easy to extend to see how opportunities
for involvement could be of benefit to other government departments
too. The use of Urban Music to re-involve young offenders is already
on the agenda of the Home Office, witness the development of rap
with young offenders at Feltham. Then there's the contribution
to be made by young talent to the music industries, which is of
concern to the Department of Trade and Industry. There's the financial
benefits for the Treasury, and there's the massive contribution
the arts can make for regeneration areas and development projects
such as the Thames Gateway, under the Office of the Deputy Prime
Minister.
Apologies I have ranged so far. I wish the CMS
Committee well in their deliberations, and I hope they come to
some practical conclusions to suggest to the Arts Council and
the DCMS to achieve more support for the advancement of British
musical theatre.
24 November 2003
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