Writing Lab on a roll with the S & S Award!!

 Charles Hart with the winners and runners-up of the Sidney Brown Memorial Award 2012, l to r; Christine Denniston, Gwyneth Herbert, Charles Hart, Denise Wright and Chris Burgess

The Sidney Brown memorial Award has been re-named the S & S Award.  This year the winners were Scott Gilmore and Claire McKenzie with their musical FOREST BOY, which had a production at the Edinburgh Festival this summer with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

I am really excited to say that there were four Specially Commended shows and my Pre-Raphaelite musical POSSESSED, with beautiful music by Steven Edis, was one of them, plus two runners up.    POSSESSED tells the story of Jane Burden a young girl from the backstreets of Oxford whose life is changed irrevocably by a chance meeting with artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Persephone by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Songs from all these shows are going to be sung in Cabaret at the beautiful brand new St James Theatre on 24th November, produced by Mercury Musical Developments.  I went to see Trisha Thorns wonderful production of London Wall here and I have to say it has a great bar!

St James Theatre

The really interesting part of this is that three of the shows were by other members of my fantastic Writing Lab: Tim Connor, Susannah Pearce, Jenny Toksvig and Andrew Brinded.  So I am overjoyed to find that on the cabaret night I will be surrounded by colleagues I have chewed the fat with and spent exciting hours giving and getting feedback on work.

Christine Denniston, the leader of the Lab Workshop, was herself one of the Runners Up for the Award last year.   I am sure Christine will be extremely pleased to discover that her Workshop writers will be taking pride of place at the St James cabaret on 24th November!