We have worked together on a huge variety of your musicals and you and very often base them on well-known or traditional stories. How do you choose which stories to adapt?
I’ve always loved adapting stories because starting with an existing structure gives you a kind of creative freedom — it’s like having a framework you can play within, twist, and reinterpret in new ways.
How I find stories really depends on the project. Sometimes I spend hours scouring the internet, searching for the right one, often looking for something a bit unusual — like Father Frost, which came from a lesser-known Russian Christmas tale, or quirky true-life stories such as Typhoid Mary. Even when I’m not actively planning a new show, I’m always collecting ideas and thinking about how they might develop in the future.
What was nice about A Christmas Carol is that, being such a timeless classic, it was one story I didn’t have to search for at all.
There have been so many versions of a Christmas Carol what makes this one stand out from the others?
That’s always the challenge with a story as familiar as A Christmas Carol — you can’t rely on the idea itself to stand out. For me, the music was key. The songs were originally written for children to sing, so I wanted the melodies to be especially catchy and memorable, while making the lyrics more intricate and playful. I spent a lot of time crafting lyrics that captured the spirit of Dickens’ original but still brought something fresh to it.
I also had fun weaving in musical elements from classic Christmas carols — they’re threaded through many of the songs in subtle, unexpected ways. And finally, the use of Kate and Bobby’s puppets is going to give this production a whole new dimension, bringing Dickens’ characters to life in a way that will hopefully feel both inventive and magical.
I think you said once that you started this piece as a choral work, just using some of Dickens’ words for narration. What was the process to turn into a full-blown piece of theatre?
I really enjoyed the various performances of the choral version, but I’d always imagined the songs as part of a fully staged musical. That said, A Christmas Carol isn’t the easiest story to stage — especially as we were wanting to work with a relatively small cast. The real breakthrough (which wasn’t my idea!) was to use puppets to bring some of the characters to life.
From there, it became a process of deciding which songs to keep as they were, which to adapt, and which to let go. That was tough, because I liked all of them! But a staged show is very different from a concert piece — the pacing has to serve the drama, and you never want the audience thinking, “Oh no, not another song — just get on with the story!”
Hopefully they won’t be thinking that… and if they are, at least they’ll have the puppets to keep them entertained!
Of all the musicals you have written, which is your favourite?
That’s a really tough question. So much of what makes a show special isn’t just the piece itself, but the people you get to work with. Two of my absolute favourites would have to be The Odyssey: An Epic Musical Epic — which I originally wrote for pupils at Comberton Village College. We later took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it received lots of wonderful five-star reviews.
The other is The Ancient Mariner, a one-man show — and when that one man is someone as talented as Matt Wilkinson (who, by some strange coincidence, is playing Scrooge in A Christmas Carol), you know you’re in for something special. Matt’s performance, combined with Lesley’s direction and Kerri’s lighting, made it a really beautiful production — even if it was a little light on silly puns!
Is there a story you want to adapt to a musical that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
There are definitely a few half-written shows I’d love to finish and see on stage one day. During lockdown, I got about halfway through writing a large-scale musical based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm — a story I’ve always loved. Like A Christmas Carol, it presents some really interesting staging challenges, which would be great fun to try and solve!