As the British Youth Music Theatre (BYMT) reaches its 20th anniversary, I chatted with the company’s chief executive/creative director Emily Gray to find out more about both BYMT and their upcoming gala at The Other Palace.
For more on BYMT, visit their website.
British Youth Music Theatre Gala details:
Where: The Other Palace, Victoria
When: 8 Jul 2024, 7pm
Ticket link: https://theotherpalace.co.uk/bymt-gala/
Congratulations on BYMT’s 20th anniversary! So, how did it all start?
When we started in 2004, the musicals on offer for young people were existing titles like Bugsy Malone and Grease, and the founders of BYMT thought, “we really need somewhere where we can make new work, with young people for young people”.
For the first couple of years we produced 3 or 4 shows but it was soon up to the bigger numbers just because of the amount of young people who wanted to come and be part of something new.
You’ve developed 120 new musicals in 20 years. It’s a brilliant achievement. What are you most proud of from all of them?
I’m proud of the collaboration between young people and professionals; you need a lot of people with courage to leap into a new musical and say ‘yes, we are going to make something’.
The pride also comes in seeing young people who came to us at 11 years old who are now in the industry, in the West End doing the thing that they love.
Especially the performers making new work because they’ve been trained up really well by us to go into a company and rise to the challenge.
The excitement for us as a company is after 20 years seeing some of our alumni, like Grace Mouat and Luke Bayer, doing really well as performers in new musicals.
So they understand all the different roles in theatre, as that’s a really important part of learning about the industry.
Babies started at BYMT. Are you really happy to see that it’s thriving?
We’re absolutely delighted. It’s so lovely. The director we worked with the other day said she sat and watched it and and was absolutely thrilled to hear the lines the young people created.
Particularly the opening number where the kids talk about what how they’re feeling, what it’s like to be a teenager – that came directly from the BYMT young people who were in the original cast.
That’s partly why the show is so fabulous because of the voices of the kids are there in it.
You have a big gala event coming up next month with some of your alumni coming back. What can audiences expect?
It’s going to be a gorgeous mixture of our current young people and our alumni.
Sometimes they’re singing together, which is really lovely, because obviously our young current young company really look up to those alumni.
That’s where they want to be, you know, they can see the journey the alumni have been through.
We did a big exercise of asking so many people from the last 20 years what shows had the most personal impact or made the most difference: we got a shortlist of 12 shows and songs from those shows will be performed at the gala.
That’s been really great for me. I took the company on 2 years ago so I’ve got to know about all these shows through them being chosen to be in the gala.
It’s been really lovely to see from those 150 shows which ones have stood the test of time and which people remember fondly.
Lewis Cornay is a lovely host and it should be a night to celebrate all the young people and writers who have made this gorgeous work. We will have industry people plus supporters and parents and friends of the young people in the audience.
It’s on the 8 July at The Other Palace, with tickets on sale from £30-50. They’ve been selling pretty fast! It will be a gathering of people from across the years, with our founder and significant board members, patrons and funders too.
And there’s a career convention on your gala day?
The daytime of the gala is a convention. Our young company panel said it was great to have a gala, but they would also like something for them, a day of activities and panels with some amazing industry people like agents, casting directors, composers.
BYMT is planning to leave London for a base in Leeds. Are you looking forward to going up North?
We are very excited! It began as part of the Art Council’s transfer programme. They were looking at London based companies who could be national and based somewhere else. It made a lot of sense to us partly because we work with people across the UK.
We do a lot of work in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so it felt like the move would make us more centrally placed. That’s definitely a good thing.
We genuinely believe that young people everywhere should be getting opportunities, so why not establish ourselves outside of London? I have a real respect for those artists who may work in London but keep themselves based in Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and further north.
Having said that, we will have a satellite office in London because there are still partnerships, there are funds, there are people we are connected with and we will always do shows in London, but our main office will be in Leeds.
Let’s talk about the music camps run by BMYT.
These are opportunities for any young people to come and get involved. What we do with a camp is we go in with an idea, that could become a wonderful new musical, or just a brilliant new story to play with for a week.
So we have a composer and a writer, director and a choreographer. They’ll be working with a group of young people who are excited by and love musicals.
There’s very little pressure – it about the process and having a really playful, creative time.
At the end of it we can say, “that’s a brilliant idea, you’ve got to do it as a show” and we can take it forward, or decide “this is great, but it’s not for us” and take it to another theatre or group to be developed.
And what about other drama colleges – do you work closely with them?
Yes, we work with them to work out new material. So this year we have developed new musicals with LAMDA, with ArtsEd, and with Leeds Conservatoire; we’ve tried out new shows with them and that’s wonderful for their students.
They get the experience of professionals coming into work with them. It’s helpful for us to test the material on the upper end of our age range. They’re really productive relationships. I think they’re all going to grow.
We also work with Mountview. We do a lovely collaboration with Candoco Dance Company, the disability led dancing company, and perform in the day of Dance at Mountview.
It’s great because so many young people ask us about where they might go, what what the courses are like. To have some insight into a drama school that may be their vibe really helps them.
You mentioned disability and one of the issues of focusing on his imbalance in this so gender race disability, whatever could you say a bit more about that?
For us, it’s about really making inclusive spaces and inclusive teams, from our board to all the freelancers we employ. Everybody is welcome and we want that to include the young people we are bringing into our courses and shows.
It’s always about looking at how we’re engaging with our young people and our practitioners. How can we make sure our residential courses are accessible?
How can we make sure that all those young people who want to be part of our programme have the support they need and the opportunity?
Do you think there’s more more women coming into writing and performing as well?
So we decided to make a conscious decision to ensure that the majority of our shows are composed by female and non-binary people and it’s 5 out of 7 productions this year, which is great.
It wasn’t that difficult because those people are there. It’s all about being proactive and going to talk to fabulous female and non-binary composers and see what their ideas are.
All the ideas around programming are done with our young company panel.
Our young people have a huge say and really hold us to task. Our panel really keep us on track with what matters to them and what’s relevant.
How do you pick those people?
After each summer season, we’ve asked the directors of each project to nominate 2 or 3 names of young people. Not necessarily the lead parts – it’s much more important that they are people who have quite strong opinions and a confidence to speak up.
The panel meets every couple of months on Zoom because they’re all over the world. They are good, generous listeners with a sense of what’s best for the company.
Can you give us some info on your summer season?
We’ve got a lovely mix of different types of music. We’ve got the punk rock show in London, a folk-influenced show in Ipswich, 80s sound music with an Irish feel in Belfast.
We have shows in very different places with a different feel to them. The young people that are in their shows feel absolutely right for that type of work.
Although a big part of our audience will be family and friends of those young people we work with, we perform in theatres that care about new audiences and audiences for new work.
We try to be at the cutting edge of new musicals.
Do you do any digital work?
The young people are excited by that, yes, but it feels like quite a long journey. I’m really hoping by next season, we will have digital work within our performances.
We have digital champions on every show, so we have young people who are making digital content snd posting on social media like TikTok and Instagram.
We’re quite delighted in Northern Ireland this year. We’ve got the show and then there’ll be a streamed performance later on in the summer of one of the locations from the story. So that’s quite a nice thing to have as well.
We need to do more. I think, because when we do livestreaming, it brings in those audiences who can’t come to the shows.