As part of this year’s Grimeborn Festival at the Arcola, award-winning company liveartshow will present an hour-long new opera, Marsha, from 11-15 August. The show will be co-produced with the Arcola, and is directed by Martin Constantine (Welsh National Opera, Royal Opera House and English National Opera) and written by TLC script reader Alan Harris (New National Theatre Tokyo/National Theatre Wales’s The Opportunity of Efficiency, National Theatre of Wales’s A Good Night Out In The Valleys, and Sherman Cymru’s Cardboard Dad). Mixing theatre with music and dance, the show features a new libretto and score, with new music from Harry Blake (Soho Theatre, OperaUpClose, winner of the Craig Barbour Award for Composition). It tells the story of a young girl discovering the truth about beauty. liveartshow was the winner of the Musical Theatre Network Award at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival with The Future For Beginners, an off-beat romantic comedy, with operatic arias and contemporary dance.
Alan said: “We wanted to explore the nature of innocence and the ideas surrounding nature and nurture. Marsha is a young girl who despite her inability to go anywhere physically goes on a journey every day around a village, meeting characters on the way. But the day that we meet her things start to fall apart and the world changes for Marsha as her realisation and understanding of her environment grows.”
liveartshow creates new theatre with music. Their first productions, Manga Sister and Rhinegold, were at the centre of the Peter Brook Empty Space Award-winning season at the Yard Theatre. The Future For Beginners (a co-production with the Wales Millennium Centre) toured last autumn, and played at Summerhall (Edinburgh Festival), where it was winner of the MTN Award 2014 for Best New Musical. Marsha has been supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Liveartshow and Arcola’s Marsha will be performed at the Arcola Theatre as part of the Grimeborn Festival from Tuesday 11 August to Saturday 15 August 15 at 8pm. Tickets are £15 / £12 concessions, £10 or less with an Arcola Passport. You can book online here.
If you are writing a play, and are interested in having Alan assess your work, please get in touch with us on . Alan reads scripts and libretti for TLC.
