UPCOMING: Mary and Kiki – Two new musicals

Mary Stuart

This week Julian Eaves took a look at two new musicals in development Mary Stuart and Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse. MARY STUART, Karamel Café, Mountview Academy A lot of drama schools commission new work, and this is one of the primary places to go to find new and exciting musical theatre. That is emphatically what we find here in this remarkable new work in development by German writer and dramaturg, Kolja Schallenberg, and his gifted and perfectly well-matched composer-collaborator, Paul Glaser. Schallenberg translates Schiller into English here, and while the effect is literary and worthy, in his desire to be ‘authentic’ and preserve the intention of the original (a rather high-bourgeois, if not actually courtly one – think of Shakespeare, but without the common touch), where this script really scores is in the chunks Schallenberg gives to Glaser to set to music. There, the magic occurs. The combination of … Read more