Introduction

In this portfolio, I aim to reflect and analyse the development of our original piece of musical theatre, called Off the Record, a show about the downfall of popular women through tough media and tabloid culture. I will be mostly focusing in on the creative process I experienced as the Movement Director and one of the Playwrights, while also evaluating the managerial and financial processes of creating a new piece of theatre. I will evaluate how important these aspects are when exploring potential avenues for funding and investments around emerging theatre. Additionally, I will be highlighting the knowledge and skills I acquired while developing our musical and overcoming challenges that arose throughout this project to then analyse how these will benefit me throughout my career in this industry. 

Creative Process as a Playwright and Movement Director

My classmate, Elsie presented the initial idea for this musical, looking at two main topics: what it’s like to live in someone’s shadow and how women are portrayed in the media, while closely following the story of a famous man’s wife after his death. We spoke about any stimuli that inspired this idea, the most influential piece being the Priscilla documentary based on the book Elvis and Me. Our group, which was a team of five females, had weekly meetings to discuss the intricate details of the plot, and different ideas, subplots and endings that we could choose from/work with. These discussions led to massive changes in direction for our plot, example being the decision to change the gender of one of our characters to a female, pushing the message around the downfall of women in the media even further.    

Scene Breakdown – Figure 1

After line vomiting and improvising scenes, scene five was a particular scene I was having difficulty with. Context of the scene is that Nancy, a young aspiring actress, who has just booked her first job of playing the role of Kerry Ferris in a biopic about famous comedian Fredrick Ferris, comes to Kerry’s home to find out about her life with her husband as research to portray her character correctly. In my first draft, that is attached as figure 2, this scene felt like a conversational ping-pong match that lacked energy and Davis states that ‘Conversational ping-pong is probably the most common form of poor dialogue produced by inexperienced scriptwriters… very often we don’t talk in this way. (Davis, 2016). Therefore, I began editing a second draft, to make this scene feel more like a conversation. Adding moments of interruption between the two characters, having more than one topic being addressed at one time and leaving moments for silences and tangents within the conversation. This second draft is attached here as figure 3. Further improvements were made to this scene, as showed in figure 4, to combat a challenge that we faced, caused by having multiple playwrights. This problem was ensuring between us we had kept consistency of style, throughout our dialogue. For example, making sure we had written each character to have and use the same style of speech. To ensure we did this, Ellie and I exchanged scenes, read through them, made notes and edits to confirm our dialogue style remained consistent. These notes were made up of questions like, would that character use that choice of word? Would that character have the confidence to say that? Would that character use slang?  

However, with my role as movement director, this felt harder to start or prepare for before our Research and Development week, because choreography and movement develop from both the music and lyrics. Therefore, I had discussions with composer and lyricists, Elsie, on where and when she had visions for movement within her music. We learnt from this discussion, that during Nancy’s I want song, we wanted to portray her imagining she’s performing to a sold-out concert arena. Research I engaged in to help me brainstorm choreography ideas were looking into popular artists of the early 2000s and their physical performance style, for example Britney Spears and dances she would perform within her concerts.  However, I struggled with feeling like this vision could be achieved with only Nancy onstage, so this then led to me making the decision to add two dancers into a part of Nancy’s song, this helped showcase her performing with her two backing dancers. This also made more scope for dance move choices, rather than being limited and also led Elsie to write backing vocals into this song, which pushed our vision further. Attached as figure 5 is our final performance of this section.  

Collaboration and communication with the rest of the creative team, in my opinion, is the most important part of this project. A moment where the collaboration between Elsie, our composer, and I pushed the intensity of our opening scene, was during our development of the flash forward we included. This began as a short section of an argument that occurs at the end of act one. We discussed how we didn’t want to just show the exact same scene twice throughout our musical, this discussion changed this section from an argument that at the end of act one occurs between Kerry and Nancy, to opening act one with just Kerry’s lines from this argument and piano underscoring in the place of Nancys response. Leaving the audience intrigued and wanting answers. I’ve attached both versions of this scene as figure 6.  

Management Process

Rehearsal schedules during our R&D week, were very loosely met. Plans would change; different scene would take longer than expected to complete and new ideas came, therefore additional unplanned writing time were needed. Our structure usually started with songs being taught, then straight into setting direction and movement, however I personally had difficulties with teaching choreography while having members of the cast on script for their songs. Therefore, in the future having the first day for all songs to be taught and giving the cast the day and evening to learn them best to their ability would help push the speed of the rehearsal process. We did begin the week with a plan for every day, however after the first day of rehearsal we realised planning for the next day based on what we achieved that day worked better for us.  Time management was also a struggle with our group because we all worked so closely together, that decisions that needed to quickly be made, often resulted in long discussions, eating into our rehearsal time. We decided to cast ourselves in our musical to prevent further disruption to our rehearsals that we may have come across if we casted fellow students, however it was difficult to spend time apart, for example I couldn’t take Izzy and Elsie to go over choreography while music was being taught to another member of the cast because Elsie was the Musical director.  

To balance my two roles throughout this project, I usually kept time in the rehearsal space, strictly for rehearsing and then for any changes needed to the script or development of choreography, I would complete during evenings or lunch breaks. However, we did have one day where we had no studios available to work in, therefore I took the opportunity to invite the creative team to my house, to work on script, plan the next day of rehearsal, choreograph material. This ensured we used our time wisely and helped keep ideas and offers interesting with multiple opinions being used.  

Financial Process

When writing a new musical there are many aspects that need to be financially considered before they can become a part of the show, as one of the writers this is something I had to think about often. Although we knew discussions around profit and funding for our musical was only hypothetical for this module, we wanted to ensure that we considered all potential issues, in case maybe one day we did want to pick this project back up. For example, as a playwright, I made the strict decision to provide a script that used the minimal number of actors possible, we landed on having a cast of six females, four principal roles and two multi-rolling ensemble tracks. We did originally want to potentially even push the show to just four women, however for the effect of certain scenes, with establishing the setting and forming relationships between all 4 women we needed to add 2 ensemble tracks to play parts including, hair and makeup artist, camera woman and witnesses of trending cat fight. If there did come a time when we were looking to hire six actors for this musical, we would try our hardest to locate Leeds based performers to prevent accommodation and travel having to be budgeted for, for both of us as the creative team and performers. We would also be looking for new graduates, to provide them with opportunities straight out of their training but also because their minimum wage is £216.63 a day, £216.63 x 6 cast members is £1299.78, then x 5 working days comes to £6498.9. (Artists Union England, 2024). Having a small cast will also help our budget with hiring rehearsal spaces because I haven’t written in or choreographed any big ensemble dance numbers, meaning we don’t need to pay for any large popular dance studios or worry about being restricted by costumes.  

Within a creative team of just five people, we had to make many decisions together rather than giving someone a third role of business and finance manager, therefore some examples of group decisions that had a positive impact on our budgeting around this musical were choosing to set our show in the early 2000s, because this gave us room to between us already own many costume options and have the cheap option of using charity shops. For example, with our sharing at the end of our R&D week, all costume were already owned by us as a creative team. However, there were many things we didn’t consider around the budget, for example some props weren’t easily accessible and would use a good amount of our budget, one example is a camcorder. To overcome this problem for our sharing we used makeshift temporary props. And then when putting our sharing of act one together, we realised how many moments there were when sound effects would work to push the story and give the audience essential exposition, therefore this would be a big expense than we hadn’t original planned for.  

Marketing fees were an area we should have given more budget and time, due to our small creative team, our main focuses were to get the show written and, on its feet, not leaving much time for promotion. However, I did manage to organise some In Kind Support with my classmate Rebecca Snowden, who enjoys photography and kindly photographed our sharing on Friday. This has enabled us to have professional photos to use when marketing and promoting our new upcoming show, which is one of the main focuses with creating new musical theatre. I’ve attached three photo examples.

All these financial aspects we took into consideration will help when investigating into potential funding bodies, for example I would try seeking support from Arts Council England through a National Lottery Project Grant and put this towards further development of our musical. Including workshops, research, further R&D weeks and collaborations with other creatives and potential performances to gain publicity and media support. I would also then investigate potential fundraisers and other support into taking our show to Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, the development of Off the Record has taught me that when creating new musical theatre, the financial and management planning are big factors on whether the piece of theatre you are creating will be successful. My script writing and choreographing skills have been challenged and therefore development massively, providing me with improved knowledge and skills within these roles when creating theatre. My main take aways from this project have been, how important communication is, especially when working on a piece that has multiple playwrights, how to keep script entertaining and the amount of time that needs to go into gaining funding and budgeting for a piece of new musical theatre. The focus should also be on making work that is both artistically engaging and realistically achievable. Overall, I learnt experimentation is the core of all pieces of theatre, from improvising scenes to begin choosing lines to making big acting choices throughout the rehearsal process, and as someone who finds improvising quite daunting, this project has taught me how important it is to develop this skill.

Bibliography

Arts Council England (2024). Arts Council England. [online] Artscouncil.org.uk. Available at: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/. 

Artists Union England (2024). Rates of Pay – Artists’ Union England. [online] www.artistsunionengland.org.uk. Available at: https://www.artistsunionengland.org.uk/rates-of-pay/.  

Davis, Rib. Writing Dialogue for Scripts. 4th Edition ed., London, Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, 2016.

Divas Forever. “Britney Spears : Live from London 2000 (Full Concert).” YouTube, 8 Apr. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYkxVVxlGTA. Accessed 17 Mar. 2026.