Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.

We are taking a break from VAULT this week to focus on another festival of emerging artists currently happening in London: MT Fest 2023 at The Other Palace and The Turbine Theatre, where lyricist Sam Norman and composer Aaron King are presenting their new musical Come Dine With Me. Yes, it’s based on the TV show.

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That’s all for now. More from me at the bottom, but first: Sam Norman and Aaron King!

When lyricist and poet Sam Norman was a first-year classics student at Oxford University, he agreed to write a musical with a friend. Norman would do the lyrics. The friend would do the music.

“I went away over Christmas and came back with an entire script, only to find that they had done nothing, and could no longer commit to the project,” Norman remembers. “I had all the lyrics but no music. And I somehow had a slot booked at the Edinburgh Fringe. I had to find a composer.”

“I think I emailed ten people, asking if they wanted to write the music for me,” he remembers. “Almost nobody replied. One person said maybe. But one person got back to me straight away and said yes.” That person was Aaron King, then a music student at Oxford, now an emerging composer.

“Since my early teens, I’d wanted to write a musical, but I can’t write lyrics or dialogue,” King says. “I needed someone who was good at that. Then, Sam just reached out to me and I jumped at the chance.” And that, continues Norman, was that. “Aaron and I met up in a coffee shop and just started working together, with zero knowledge of each other or each other’s work.”

As a lyricist-composer moniker, Norman and King has a nice ring. That first show they wrote together – Pawn, a Tim Rice-inspired dramatization of the outrageous 1978 World Chess Championship Final – ran at the Edinburgh Fringe for a week in 2016. The duo, still students, followed it with a full-length adaptation of Cyrano De Bergerac in 2017 and another original work, Nice Guy, in 2018.

Five years later, and they are embarking on their fourth project together. Come Dine With Me is inspired by the much-loved Channel 4 reality TV show of the same name, and runs as an hour-long work-in-progress at The Other Palace as part of Paul Taylor-Mills’ MT Fest, the annual exhibition of that has been platforming eight early-stage musicals since 2019.

“Nell Butler created Come Dine With Me, and I know her a bit,” says Norman of the musical’s origins. “I actually used to babysit her kids and walk her dog. At the beginning of lockdown, she mentioned to me that she was interested in turning it into a musical somehow, and so we have.”

The idea appealed to Norman and King because of the inherent tension in the Come Dine With Me format: a group of contestants from different backgrounds, with different opinions, sharing a meal together, and rating each other. Inevitably, says Norman, there is drama. In the musical, that drama focuses on four contestants – “Janie, well-spoken Barbara, pork pie king Duncan, and a vegan,” introduces Norman – and the four-strong TV crew making the show, overseeing their chicanery.

“We wanted to take this funny, happy TV show and preserve the comedy and the joy of it,” Norman continues. “But we also wanted to explore its deeper, more philosophical undercurrents. We wrote it during total lockdown, when none of us could get together with our friends and break bread. And that is what Come Dine With Me is all about. There is something quite primal, quite ritualistic about it.”

“We wanted to take this funny, happy TV show and preserve the comedy and the joy… but we also wanted to explore its deeper, more philosophical undercurrents…”

Both Norman and King were interested in making musicals from a young age. Norman grew up in London and fell in love with musical theatre after seeing Billy Elliot - multiple times - with his family. King grew up in Cheltenham, was a chorister at Tewkesbury Abbey, and excelled at several different instruments.

Since making their first three shows – Pawn, Cyrano De Bergerac and Nice Guy – and graduating, they have gone their separate ways. Norman moved to New York, where he now lives, to do a two-year MFA in writing musical theatre at NYU Tisch, and has since written several more shows – The Yellow Wallpaper, Three Penelopes, and forthcoming podcast musical Echolocation. He writes poetry, too: his whimsical, Dahl-ish debut, A Teen’s Guide to Modern Manners, was published in 2016.

King, meanwhile, completed an MA in composing at the National Film and Television School, and has subsequently written music for a variety of media, including film (he orchestrated the music for the 2022 superhero blockbuster Black Adam), video games (he scored the award-nominated Hook Up) and more (you can listen to his exquisite choral compositions on his Soundcloud page here.)

Now, they are back working on musicals together, though – and their writing relationship has developed and deepened over time. “At first, Sam wrote lyrics and I set them to music,” King says. “Now, it is much more back and forth. Sometimes things are more lyric-driven, sometimes I will come up with a melody, and Sam will write a lyric to fit. Our relationship is much more fluid now.”

Their musical sensibilities have developed over time. On his website, where you can get a taste of his stuff, Norman writes that he is “drawn to down-to-earth, heartfelt narratives” and that he is “a sucker for soaring melodies and zingy lyrics.” He cites Fun Home and Hamilton as big influences. King, meanwhile, is more chameleonic, classically trained but able to adapt to the job at hand. “When I write music, I tend to write it as if I have everything I could ever want,” he says. “Then, if I need to scale it back for performance, I can.”

Come Dine With Me has been scaled back for its workshop performance at MT Fest, for example – a small band and a few props is all they are working with – but the pair have plans to expand it, and to take it to the Edinburgh Fringe and beyond. “We want to use MT Fest to see it on stage and to improve on it where we can,” explains Norman. “But we are hoping it will have a future life, too.”

The cast of Come Dine With Me at MT Fest 2023.

What do you want to do?

Big picture, we want to keep making musicals together. We want to make an audio-only podcast musical at some point, perhaps by adapting and updating one of the shows we wrote a while ago.
As for Come Dine With Me, there are many different directions we would love to go in, and any of them would be incredible.

What support do you need to get there?

I guess the broad strokes would be for producers to see it, recognise its wide appeal, and get excited by it. After that, the Edinburgh Fringe, and a fully-fledged production somewhere, ideally a prominent off-West End venue. Who knows, maybe even a West End venue one day?

How can people find out more about you?

People can come and see Come Dine With Me at The Other Palace. And we are both quite easily contactable online via our websites, here and here. We would love to hear from anyone!

That’s it for now. I’ll be back in your inboxes on Monday with a pick of five shows to see during the third week of VAULT Festival. Next Friday’s issue is TBC, but I have a couple of exciting ideas in the pipeline.

One final reminder about the various ways you can support this newsletter: you can share it with anyone you think might be interested, you can become a paid subscriber using the button at the top, or you can get in touch with me about using it for promotional purposes.

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That’s all. Thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch for any reason, just reply to this email or contact me via Twitter - I’m @FergusMorgan. See you in a week!

Fergus

The Crush Bar

Sam Norman and Aaron King are making musicals…