Annex B
A HISTORY OF THE BRIDEWELL THEATRE
The Bridewell Theatre was founded in 1994 in
the derelict swimming pool hall of the St Bride Foundation Institute
by theatre director, Carol Metcalfe, who chanced on the space
while searching for a show venue for her newly formed theatre
company, Breach of the Piece. Although she had no plans to start
a theatre, Carol saw such potential in the beautiful swimming
pool hall with its wrought iron staircases, sweeping balconies
and pitched glass roof that she set about persuading the Foundation
to assist her in starting a theatre there.
The Institute itself was built in 1894 to provide
"social and educational facilities for the workers of Fleet
Street". In the nineteenth century the workers of Fleet Street
were the printers who set the print and turned the presses to
produce the nation's top newspapers; these days the workers of
Fleet Street are the employees of companies like Goldman Sachs,
KPMG, Reuters and Unilever but although the jobs have changed,
the need for recreation remains. The Foundation saw that a theatre
would assist in fulfilling their charitable mandate and therefore
agreed to support the conversion of the Victorian swimming pool
into a theatre.
From its earliest days the Bridewell Theatre
was hailed as one of the most exciting and atmospheric theatre
spaces in the capital. The theatre is a flexible space in which
shows can be presented in a variety of stage formats: thrust,
traverse, in-the-round, as well as several variations on the end-on
set up. The old pool still exists under the stage floor and can
be used to provide an orchestra pit, trap doors and different
stage levels and although the seating capacity is limited to a
maximum of approximately 175, the stage area can be comparable
with that available at some West End theatres. In 1999 the adjacent
Laundry Room, complete with Victorian washing machine and spin
drier, was converted into the theatre bar with the aid of an Arts
Council Lottery grant.
Amidst all this history the Bridewell set about
creating its own. Inspired by the ideas of two of Breach of the
Piece's founder members, Clive Paget and Tim Sawers, who had long
wished to experiment with producing musicals on an intimate scale,
the Bridewell took the first step towards filling that "gap
in the market" and becoming the specialist theatre it now
is. Just three months after its opening it presented the second
London production of Stephen Sondheim's groundbreaking musical,
Pacific Overtures. This achieved our aim of being a theatre
specialising in that sector of theatre where drama and music come
together ie musical theatre, contemporary opera, and drama with
music. Becoming a centre for development and experimentation in
the genre, took a little longer!
During the first two years the focus had to
be on establishing the Theatre's existence by keeping the doors
open. A wide variety of work was presented: Shakespeare to capture
a schools audience, experimental drama, an anarchic literary and
arts festival hosted by writer Ian Sinclair, jazz nights with
Jacqui Dankworth, the Royal Shakespeare Company's annual fringe
festival, Alex Kingston starring in an acclaimed production of
The Lady from The Sea, touring opera and cabaret performances.
To provide a specific link to our uniquely City based audience
Lunchbox Theatre was established in 1995 and has continued ever
since, as much part of City life at Ludgate Circus as the local
Prêt A Manger. Lunchbox Theatre serves up a bite-sized piece,
no longer than 50 minutes, of drama, comedy, or musical theatre
Tuesday to Friday at 1pm. Over the years it has developed a loyal
audience who enjoy the diversity of our programme of which more
than 50% is new writing.
By the theatre's second birthday in January
1996, it was time to put another marker in the sand and the first
of the Bridewell's classic revivals, Damn Yankees, was
presented. Such was the scale of the critical acclaim for this
production that its composer, Richard Adler, flew in from the
USA to see what all the fuss was about: fortunately he declared
himself delighted! To build on this success that summer a three
show season of American Musicals was presented: Burt Bacharach
and Hal David's Promises, Promises, On The Twentieth Century
by Coleman, Comden and Green and Romance, Romance by Keith
Herrman and Barry Harman. The season was a tremendous success
in putting the Bridewell on the capital's theatrical map and the
in-house production On The Twentieth Century achieved rave
reviews even surpassing those received for Damn Yankees.
To complete the success the London premiere show, Romance Romance,
made it into the West End for a run at the Gielgud Theatre the
following spring. At the end of 1996 the Bridewell won a Peter
Brook Award for its outstanding contribution to Musical Theatre
and Carol Metcalfe was named by The Times newspaper as
the "up and coming" theatrical personality of the year.
1997 began with the starting of the Bridewell
Youth Theatre. We regarded, and still regard, this work as part
of our artistic output and from the start the emphasis for participants
was on inspiration, self-expression and acquiring the skills to
make that expression as effective as possible. Several of the
members of our Youth Theatre have gone on to successful careers
in theatre but of equal value are the achievements of those who
tell us that the inspiration of their time at the Bridewell has
led them into a happier place in their lives. Over the years BYT
has produced some extraordinary work which has been an important
inspiration to the grown-ups!
As a result of the success of its production
of Pacific Overtures the Bridewell had made contact with
Stephen Sondheim who had visited the theatre and become its Patron.
In1997 the theatre was privileged to be given by the composer
the rights to present his first ever, as yet unseen, musical Saturday
Night. This world premiere production attracted enormous attention,
received excellent reviews and the Bridewell Theatre Company went
on to make the original cast recording. On the back of all these
successes it was clearly time to initiate the next step in making
the Bridewell a place where musicals could be developed and experimentation
occur. In 1998 therefore we produced our first new musical, Eyam
by Andrew Peggie and Stephen Clark. This interesting piece told
the story of the coming of the plague to Derbyshire in 1620, it
was a thoughtful show tackling a subject very different from those
generally then associated with musicals and indicated the Bridewell's
wish to produce the best cutting edge work available. The summer
season that year also included The Best of Times a compilation
of the work of Jerry Herman that transferred to the Vaudeville
Theatre for a short season.
Undertaking the production of new work however
involves considerably more financial risk than producing the more
immediately popular revivals, our reputation had grown at a prodigious
rate but the theatre's administrative structure was still that
of a fringe theatre. With Carol as Artistic Director and Jacqui
Coghlan, Administrator, the Bridewell had run with a very small
staff but it was clear that the theatre's artistic aims now required
a more sophisticated administrative structure. Carol therefore
asked her two long-time collaborators, Clive Paget and Tim Sawers,
to join the staff of the theatre. Clive, who had been following
his acting and directing career, had already been Associate Director
for over a year, while Tim had been pursuing his "alternative
career" as a business consultant within the gas industry.
Leaving behind a nought from his annual salary, Tim took over
as the Executive Director of the Bridewell and set about restructuring
the organisation to help support the theatre's artistic ambitions.
With the support of this organisational development,
the year that followed was one of the most productive in the Bridewell's
history and we were able to produce work representing the full
range of the theatre and music we wished to promote. We ventured
into small scale opera with a double-bill of Michael Nyman's opera:
The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat paired with Tom
Stoppard's After Magritte, presented two outstanding new
plays Higher Than Babel by local Q.C. Andrew Caldecott
and the European premiere of Nixon's Nixon , the UK premiere
production of On A Clear Day You Can see Forever, a production
of Gershwin's Of Thee I Sing that broke our box office
records and, representing new musical theatre writing, the European
premiere of Floyd Collins by Adam Guettel and Tina Landau.
Each of these shows received excellent reviews and Nixon's
Nixon went off on a world tour eventually coming into the
Comedy Theatre for a successful run in 2001. It was Floyd Collins
however that showed most clearly where we were going. The production,
directed by Clive Paget, of this groundbreaking piece was chosen
by the Observer as one of the top ten productions of the year
and the theatre won a second Peter Brook Award.
2000 brought a wonderful promenade production
of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and David Kernan (the inspiration
behind Side by Side by Sondheim) devised a new Sondheim
celebration, Moving On to mark the composer's 70th birthday.
A concert series, The Cutting Edge, The Best of British
and All the Way from America, was devised to showcase the
best new writing from both sides of the Atlantic. One of these,
The Cutting Edge, proved such a powerful work that it transferred
to the Donmar Theatre for two performances in early September
and was again revived at the first International Festival of Musical
Theatre in Cardiff in the autumn of 2002.
During the following year we produced the European
premieres of Michael John LaChiusa's Hello Again and of
Jason Robert Brown's Songs for a New World. We were proud
that these productions, together with the production of Floyd
Collins, meant that we had been responsible for bringing to
London the work of three of the most creative composers currently
working in musical theatre. It was also satisfying that our work
continued to receive outstanding plaudits for its quality. This
did not mean that life at the Bridewell was trouble free, producing
new work always requires financial support and especially so when
producing musical theatre with its demand for orchestrations,
band players and large casts. The following year we decided we
must husband our finances and therefore limited our in-house productions
to two devised pieces celebrating different aspects of the work
of Sondheim, There's Always A Woman and The Road You
Didn't Take. Both these shows were great critical successes
and tours of them are already lined up.
2003 began with the box office success of Anyone
Can Whistle and with the award from London Arts of a grant
for a development production. Perhaps unsurprisingly, public funders
have been hard to convince that anyone producing musical theatre
could be short of money: they have regarded this area of theatre
as solely commercial. The funded project which involves three
very different types of musical theatre writing, is the work of
young writers from both sides of the Atlantic, it will be premiered
in the autumn of 2003. Before this we have produced a show The
Ballad of Little Jo with which we have been involved several
years. Finding sufficient financial support has been a long business
so it is satisfying that after all the effort the production has
been greeted with outstanding reviews and hailed by many as the
best new musical to be seen in London for several years.
The Bridewell is one of only three theatres
in the City area of London, the other two being in the Barbican
Centre, and is the only City theatre with a resident producing
company. In London the Bridewell is unique in being the only London
theatre whose artistic focus is on the development of musical
theatre. In its relatively short life we have become a flourishing
part of the capital's theatre scene. Our artistic aims are as
clear today as they were ten years ago. We aim to continue to
fulfil them.
26 September 2003
|
