Olivier Award-Winner ‘Standing At The Sky’s Edge’ Reveals West End Transfer
EXCLUSIVE: Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which won best musical at the Olivier Awards Sunday night, will transfer to the West End’s Gillian Lynne Theatre early in 2024, Deadline can reveal.
The show written by playwright Chris Bush, featuring rock songs from the catalog of Richard Hawley, moves into the Gillian Lynne from February for an initial six-month season.
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It won two prizes at Sunday’s ceremony: the all-important best musical honor and original score or new orchestrations for Hawley’s music and lyrics and Tom Deering’s orchestrations.
The story is set in Park Hill, a brutalist apartment block built in the early 1960s, and follows three families who occupy one particular flat at different periods over six decades. Hawley describes it as a “love letter” to his hometown of Sheffield in South Yorkshire.
Standing at the Sky’s Edge played two seasons at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and then a six-week run at the National Theatre in London, which ended nine days ago. It played on the NT’s Olivier main stage to audience numbers of over 50,000, according to Rupert Lord of Various Productions who came up with the original idea.
Lord took his project to Sheffield Theaters, then run by Daniel Evans, who has since run Chichester Festival Theatre and is about to take the helm at the Royal Shakespeare Company as co-artistic director. He will be joined by Tamara Harvey from Theatr Clwyd.
“People physically queued up for day seats from pre-dawn for last-minute tickets and this happened in the age of online ticket purchasing,” Lord said.
The National scrambled to get as many people in to see it as possible and there wasn’t a single empty seat or standing space during the entire run. “They were selling standing-only tickets for 10 quid,” Lord added. “It became a bona-fide word-of-mouth hit.”
Deadline saw evidence of this several times with people milling about at the box office desperate for ticket returns.
“For it to explode like that told us it was a universal story,” Lord added. “It’s the story of every city that has social housing.”
The National received theater programmers from Scandinavia, Japan, China, North America, and elsewhere. “We also had calls from all over asking: how can we be involved?”
Lord came up with the project after hearing about electric graffiti created by Jason Lowe at Park Hill asking his lover to marry him. “I was listening in inadvertently and I was just gripped by the story,” Lord recalled.
He tracked down Richard Hawley, a Sheffield native, asking him to write a score and to use numbers from his back catalogue. Hawley was intrigued but had major demands: ”No wafting and no jazz hands.”
“He meant that he didn’t want it to be what he called a musical musical. He warned me that I’d be dead if I allowed that to happen,” Lord told us. “He was joking but I knew what he meant.”
Early attempts at the show didn’t go to plan. By this time Rob Hastie had taken over at Sheffield Theatres and he suggested that they meet Chris Bush, a local playwright. Within 48 hours Bush had come up with a “pretty good treatment” said Lord.
Three weeks after that the show was written and Hastie, now on board as director, started to put it all together. “The key was finding the universal in the particular,” Lord observed.
He praised the tenacity and faith of both Sheffield and the National Theatre.
Rufus Norris, artistic chief at the National “was extraordinary to stake a risk on us” Lord said. “We also need to thank the people of Sheffield for letting us tell their story” he added.
The creative team includes: Hastie, set and costume designer Ben Stones; choreographer Lynne Page, Tom Deering, music supervisor, arranger, and orchestrator; Mark Henderson, lighting; Bobby Aitken, sound design; Cynthias De La Rosa, hair, wigs, and make-up design; Stuart Burt, casting; and John Rutledge, music director.
Cast of the recent production included: Faith Omole, Rachael Wooding, Alex Young, Alastair Natkiel, Baker Mukasa, Maimuna Memon, Robert Lonsdale, Samuel Jordan, Adam Price and Deborah Tracey.
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