27 Jul Guest Blog | Carl Miller, Christopher Ash and Adam Lenson
KSF Artists of Choice is open to artists across the disciplines of dance, theatre, musical theatre and film. Over the next few weeks, we will post guest blogs from some of our 2016 grant winners about how the grant has impacted their work. Applications will be open in early 2017.
Name | Carl Miller, Christopher Ash and Adam Lenson
Project | Wasted
Year Awarded KSF Grant | 2016
What does the KSF grant mean to you and your project?
CM: The KSF grant gives us the chance to invite brilliant performers, musicians and others to come and help us test out our material - and pay them! Musicals need to be tried out with live people, they can’t be understood on the page. The more time there is to work with people the more we’ll be able to look at and listen to what we’ve created and see how we can make it better. It’s what every writer of musicals dreams of having at this stage.
What inspired your project?
CA: We’re inspired by the genius and passion of the Brontë siblings, particularly their determination to create art despite being ‘Nobodies From Nowhere’ as they say in one of our songs. Love and death, addiction and visionary creativity - the true life story of this amazing quartet has so much to inspire us. It teeters between triumph and tragedy and that gives us a thrilling, wide, emotional canvas.
Talk about your journey prior to the receiving the award. What kind of difficulties or roadblocks did you encounter along the way? How did you overcome them?
CM: We first met in a great project called Book, Music and Lyrics (BML) which brings together composers, lyricists and librettists interested in writing new musicals. We found we worked well together and started to write shows. But the gap from having written some interesting material to having someone show enough faith in a show to get the whole thing on its feet didn’t happen until now! Wasted will be our first musical to go in front of the public this October in work in progress performances at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, who have also been wonderfully supportive.
AL: I originally studied to be a doctor but found that the most sharply meaningful experiences in my life had been spent in and around the theatre. I gave up medicine and wrote letters to directors I admired asking if I could sit in their rehearsal room as they worked. Terry Johnson answered an email and gave me that first opportunity and I have been fortunate to work as his assistant and associate director in the years since.
What would you say are the most defining moments of your career thus far?
CM: I trained as a director, and the realisation that I really wanted to write was a key moment. I learned a huge amount from that experience as a director that helps me with my writing.
CA: I distinctly remember standing in a supermarket in the winter of 2007, receiving a phone call from Dylan Emery, asking me if I was interested in playing piano for a new, as-yet-untitled improvised musical theatre project. “Yes,” I said, staring at the sandwiches. Little did I realise that my “yes” would be the beginning of an 8-year journey.
AL: The defining moment of my professional career was directing Jason Robert Brown’s Songs For A New World at the St James Theatre. To be able to direct such a stellar cast on a main stage was a moment beyond my wildest dreams.
Do you have any advice for emerging artists?
All: Keep going! Look at the Brontës. They knew no-one and lived in the middle of nowhere. They had to pay to publish their books themselves and their first book sold only two copies. But they sat in one room in a stinking, isolated town with no proper water supply and wrote some of the greatest novels in history.
Learn more about Wasted here.
Adam, Chris and Carl discuss their project here.