The full first season has been announced for Marylebone Theatre, London’s most exciting new venue. The theatre recently announced its launch production Dmitry, a thrilling production by Peter Oswald, directed by the acclaimed Tim Supple in his return to London theatre. Now, the rest of this new theatre’s full first season has been announced, with a rich programme of music and spoken word events, including concerts by Stile Antico, Jess Gillam, and the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, a festive whodunnit straight from off-Broadway and a T.S. Eliot poetry reading by the acclaimed Ben Okri.
Curated by Robin Tyson (King’s Singers), five outstanding concerts by some of the most celebrated performers in the UK will open Marylebone Theatre’s music programming this December. Stile Antico, one of the world’s finest vocal ensembles, will perform a unique and beautiful sequence of music and readings inspired by the Nativity story. Music by Renaissance composers Thomas Tallis, Michael Praetorius and John Sheppard are interspersed with poetry by John Donne and George Herbert.
The National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO), the UK’s finest young professional jazz group, takes to the stage for an exciting celebration of the life and work of jazz icon Dizzy Gillespie, directed by Mark Armstrong.
The award-winning saxophonist and radio presenter Jess Gillam performs an animated programme with Zeynep Özsuca, featuring diverse music by Francis Poulenc, Meredith Month, Luke Howard, Barbara Thompson, Astor Piazzolla and others.
The internationally acclaimed Carducci Quartet bring their multi award-winning virtuosity to Marylebone Theatre with a powerful programme including Haydn’s Quartet Op. 33/2 ‘The Joke’, Rebecca Clarke’s Poem, Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 59/2 and festive Christmas music.
Ensemble Pro Victoria, a young vocal ensemble specialising in sacred music, will sing well-loved traditional Christmas Carols in Marylebone Theatre’s partner church next door, St Cyprian’s Clarence Gate. Directed by Toby Ward, the programme features well-loved traditional carols from the 15th century to the present day, including Benjamin Britten’s stunning Ceremony of Carols with harpist Cecily Beer.
This Christmas, DEM Productions and Fat Goose Productions bring Mark Shanahan’s A Sherlock Carol to the Marylebone stage. Just around the corner from 221B Baker Street, Marylebone Theatre is the perfect venue for this New York Times Critic’s Pick, which will delight and mystify audiences following a successful off-Broadway run. Many years after Ebenezer Scrooge has let Christmas into his heart, he has suffered a mysterious and peculiar death, leading the distraught and not-so-Tiny Tim to seek the help of the great detective Sherlock Holmes. Using his powers of deduction, Holmes must overcome his own ghosts on Christmas Eve to solve the murder of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Launching Marylebone Theatre’s spoken word programme is a stirring solo rendition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, performed by Booker Prize-winning poet Ben Okri (The Famished Road) and directed by Geraldine Alexander. The performance, marking the 100th anniversary of the acclaimed modernist poem, will be accompanied by a live music score and dance. Ben Okri says, I have always loved The Waste Land. It is a poem that continually speaks to us of the loss of meaning and the fragmentation of our times. It is, in many ways a war poem, and it manages to offer some vision back to sanity. In these times when so much is collapsing around us, in these times of war and doubt, when we need true values to ‘shore against our ruins’, this is just the poetic medicine we need, one that speaks the truths we need to hear.
The Artistic Director of Marylebone Theatre, Alexander J. Gifford, says, I am delighted by the scope and beauty of our opening season. To be hosting artists of the calibre of Ben Okri and Stilo Antico is a joy and an honour. Our in-house production, Dmitry, promises to be both urgently meaningful and powerfully moving. To follow it with a delightful Christmas piece fresh from off-Broadway shows, I hope, the range and seriousness of our ambition.
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