Saturday 22 June 2013

Lia's Guide at the Bridewell





As promised, some pictures from the production of Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery which was on at the Bridewell Theatre June 12 to 15.
The production was pretty scary for me, as we haven't had long to work on Lia, and all my friends and family were lining up to see it, but luckily I was blessed with fabulous collaborators, creatives and cast, the audiences were enthusiastic and we sold out almost every performance. Special  thanks to Paul Herbert, Andy Barnes and everyone at Perfect Pitch, Ryan McBryde who directed, and Lizzi Gee, the  choreographer. The cast were the best advert possible for their college -  the MTA, which offers the UK's first accelerated training scheme for musical theatre professionals. I hope Lia's Guide brings them the luck they deserve. Remember these names..got to be some stars of the future..
.As for me, it's back to the rewrites...
Lia gets her cheque...and look who signed it
Imogen Fowler as Lia
Winner's advisers, Gilda and Kevin, played by Sian Watkins and Richard Watkins






Ashton Charge as Raf -  a vampire sings...


Clark James and Pamela Wernham as Lia's mum and dad
Shaz and Jack on the trail of Lia and Raf...amid the topiary of Primrose Hill
Lia and mates go shopping

Phoebe Rose White as Ball 23. You'll never see such glam lottery balls again
Imogen Fowler as Lia
The three bitches...Jade Jordan, Jenny Webster and RoxyHowells-Davis

Lia and her supernatural crush, Raf
Passion in the internet caf..

Alice Ferreira and Joe Toland as Lia's mates, Shaz and Jack


The seven brilliant lottery balls: Laura Jane Cook, Becki Dobbin, Simone Murphy, hannah Shaw, Remy Moynes, Rose Shalloo and Phoebe Rose White 
 (thanks to the MTA for the pics)


Thursday 13 June 2013

Cover reveal: Salvage

I'm very happy to be able to reveal the cover for my next book, Salvage, which will be published in hardback by Atom Books in January 2014 -  only six months to wait!

I adore this cover. It shows brother and sister Aidan and Cass, who haven't seen each other for  twelve years, since Cass was adopted by a wealthy family. They meet again through fate and Facebook, long-buried secrets are uncovered and the reunion changes them both forever.
I love the tension in Cass's shoulders, the vulnerability of Aidan's neck. I love the colour, the font and the clean uncluttered feel of it. And I love the way it is genderfree, in its assumptions about readers and writer.
Thank you Atom! I promise to have my copy edits back with you very soon!

(The first night of Lia the musical went very well -  a report tomorrow)

Tuesday 11 June 2013

First Night for Lia


 

Some people get lucky on the lottery. I got lucky  just over a year ago when I received an email from a guy called Andy Barnes. He runs Perfect Pitch, a company devoted to creating and supporting new musicals. ‘We were wondering if you’d ever thought of adapting your book Lia’s Guide to Winning the Lottery into a musical?’ he wrote.
 

Well, no, I have to admit that I’d never given it a minute’s thought, my daydreams being more  about Hollywood blockbusters. And, err, winning the lottery. But as soon as I read the email I had visions of a big department store number with flying shopping bags and clashing stilettos.  I liked the idea even more when I met Andy and the rest of the Perfect Pitch team and they shared their idea of singing lottery balls. They showed me clips from a workshop they’d held with students from the Musical Theatre Academy, a college in Islington. My characters, singing and dancing...it was like magic.

I’d written Lia’s Guide in 2010, setting myself the challenge of making a book about personal finance attractive to teenagers. It’s a book about chance and fortune, relative values and valuing your relatives. It’s about being very rich and very poor. Because  ‘dark romance’  dominated teen fiction at the time, I added in a moody, mysterious love interest, a boy who was almost definitely a vampire, an angel or a lovely, fluffy werewolf.

I’ve learned a lot in the last few months as we set about turning the book into the show. I’ve learned to let go of characters who worked fine on the page but are dull or peculiar on the stage. I’ve grappled with lyrics, and learned to love stage directions. I’ve learned that writing a musical is more like my previous existence as a news reporter than my current one as an author of teen fiction (the team work, the brutal deadlines, the swingeing cuts).
I am a print-media person. I work with words on paper, I work for readers. Learning to think about staging, about how words sound, how an actor will interpret them, how to get people on and off a stage -  it doesn't always come easily. But it's exciting to feel as though you are learning, and to be trusted with the opportunity to have a go. I'm very lucky in that Perfect Pitch partnered me with Paul Herbert whose music is so wonderful that I've quite often wanted to cut all the dialogue so we can just have back-to-back songs, and I've also been privileged to work with brilliant directors Ryan McBryde and John Brant, and choreographer Lizzi Gee.
Tonight is the first night of a run of performances of the show, performed by those talented students of the MTA, many of whom took part in that initial workshop. It's a developmental version -  changes will happen afterwards, but it's come on a long way from the first  version of the musical, put together with the help of a valiant bunch of students in Carlisle who work shopped the first stages of the script.  I hope Lia brings them all the luck they deserve. I'm making a list of stars of the future, and will be boring people for years now with my tales of how I knew the big names of musical theatre when they were just starting out.

It's on at the Bridewell Theatre, just off Fleet Street, just around the corner from where I started my career in journalism 32 years ago (I was a child reporter!). Fittingly, Lia the musical, even more than the book, is about journalism. It's about misunderstandings and misinterpretations, gossip and mis-reporting, the courage it takes to tell the truth.
I've neglected this blog in recent months because I've been writing the musical, and two books as well. I hope that anyone who comes along will think it's been worthwhile! Details here.