Musical Theatre residential, February 2020

Over February half term, we spent a magical, toe-tapping, follow-spot few days in the world of Musical Theatre as 34 students from our Core and Composer/Music Producer programmes came together to arrange, compose and perform some astonishing pieces of repertoire. Thanks to the tutors Andrew Trewhella, Andy Rapps and Garry Kroll; House Parents and support tutors Jennie Troup, Luke Speirs, James Aldridge and Rebecca Hill; Garry Kroll (drummer) and thanks to Bright for their tech support.

Presented with the skeleton of a piano score, our composers were busy developing specific skills connected with orchestration (furthering their understanding of harmony, transposition, balance of parts, instrument pitch ranges etc), reworking/adding parts as they moved on to other performance and musical aspects of the piece – developing more idiomatic and stylistically appropriate parts, adding in counter melodies, instrumental solos and more.

Our Core programme vocalists and instrumentalists worked so well together to create spell-binding performances of songs from Les Mis, Sunday in the Park with George, Jesus Christ Superstar and many more. We also invited potential new students and PDP programme students to join us for a sense of how a SWMS core residential works and they rose to the occasion wonderfully. The full YouTube playlist is available here

“Thanks so much for organising such a fantastic residential. Oscar has come back absolutely buzzing. He said the other kids were amazing-all so musical and so talented and the tutors and house parents were brilliant. He absolutely loved singing musical theatre and joining in the creation of the work. It sounded so fantastic. The concert was utterly awesome.” (Parent feedback)

“I had such an amazing time, felt super well looked after and learnt so so much from the whole experience. Im so proud to be in SWMS and it will always be a huge part of me.” (Student feedback)