U.Me, The Musical: new radio musical brings hope in the pandemic

‘It was the 30 November last year.  It was cold and grey outside, we were in lockdown – and while I was washing up after lunch, I thought how much I missed that moment when you are in the hall of the auditorium, the lights go down, and the music starts. I felt so strongly how I was missing that feeling of anticipation, that feeling that creation was about to happen – and I thought of all the artists and all the other people in theatres who were not working because of the lockdown.’   

And the first microbe of what has arisen as a pioneering innovation – ‘U.Me, The Musical’, a brand new creation about an on-line discovery of love during lockdown, made exclusively for worldwide radio – was being born in the imagination of Simon Pitts, a visionary award-winning film director who is also the commissioning editor of Arts and Faith for the BBC World Service’s thriving radio network. 

Simon grew up with the theatre and music in his blood – his grandmother was a cellist in the Sadlers Wells Opera Orchestra, his mother and also father worked in the theatre, and he is an avid lover and connoisseur of the stage in all its manifestations: theatre, opera, musicals, film, and more. Like millions around the world, not only the cruel loss of life but also the suspension of live theatre in the pandemic has frightened and distressed him – but Simon is a believer in art’s survival through the ages, and above all in its power to heal and inspire during the harshest times of suffering.  

‘As I was drying the cups on that cold, bleak lockdown day, the idea came to mind that we at the BBC should do a radio musical that could provide joy, comfort and consolation – and of course it would give an opportunity to actors and musicians to work again after months and months of being silenced and, as it were, disabled by the pandemic. 

'I thought of Mel Brooks’ musical The Producers – although the subject matter and music are completely different to U.Me, it has a similar intention of taking something very scary and reducing its power.  And I thought that with a new musical we could blunt some of the fear of Covid 19 and offer some hope.’

But how to begin – creating a theatre piece for radio and making it in lockdown?     

‘In fact’, Simon continues, ‘the isolation of lockdown can give the imagination more space to develop. I wanted to explore the idea of contacting an ideal musician as the composer of the score. No one immediately came to mind, but I found there was an award for emerging musical theatre talents in Britain called the Stiles and Drewe Prize. I listened through to all the previous winners, and one name stood out a mile in terms of what I was looking for, and that was Theo Jamieson. I heard such a range of intelligence and ambition in the music and sensed an ideal talent for what I was thinking of.

'Even at this early stage we knew we would be taking on a massive new challenge – creating a book, lyrics, music and audio, as distinct from live theatre, stage production all through virtual communication and then, somehow, recording all the performers and parts and putting them together during lockdown. Theo and I started working on the book and script together, and Theo’s music began to flow.'

Theo has been making a strong impression with gifts in a wide range of musical styles: he has music-directed Here Lies Love, a disco musical, at the National Theatre, conducted West End productions of classic Broadway scores Funny Girl and High Society; music- supervised the West End and international productions of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, a hit pop musical; and additionally he has played the concertante piano part for the neo-Romantic The Light In The Piazza with Renée Fleming at the Royal Festival Hall. 

All the while, though, he has been increasingly preoccupied with composing and writing. He explains: ‘When Simon contacted me and said he wanted to do a radio musical in response to the Covid pandemic that would bring joy, my first question was ‘what kind of joy?’. And the answer we landed on was the joy of romantic energy and imagination. This is an incredibly strange time, full of contradictions: on the one hand our lives are terribly muted, but on the other our imaginations are exploding. So though we're locked down, our inner feelings are massive. Our dreams about ourselves and the people in our lives can run riot because they’re not diverted or disrupted by the normal bustle of everyday reality. And something about this wilder imaginative space translates into the music-making for me: the musical gestures end up bigger, more adventurous, more unencumbered than they might be in normal times.’

Which is precisely what Simon was looking for to suit the subject matter, as he explains.     

‘Theo has a great enthusiasm and remarkable talent for composing popular tunes: but popular music that is rich and layered – and contemporary. That combination is very difficult to pull off and Theo’s music, which is highly emotive, achieves it in spades. Without wanting to sound pretentious, for me catharsis is a very important experience in art and in entertainment, and I was intuitively clear that we would create a story with music that would allow us all as listeners to hear our experience of the last year and what we have had to go through, and in doing so give our audience space for reflection and contemplation. So, a lot of the story has been drawn from news reports, personal experiences, and experiences of how friends have been coping with the pandemic.’ 

The central theme of the story is an online romance of two young people who meet virtually in a work place.

‘They meet on opposite sides of the world: in England and Japan,' says Simon. 'One of them has a best friend who is having an internet wedding, and the guests are having food sent to them for the wedding dinner – and for me that symbolises the up-side of this pandemic: the resilience that so many people have shown, the will to live life whatever and defy the odds in the circumstances.  And that also speaks for the arts, culture and creativity – they are not going away, despite the damage that has been inflicted.'

Another challenge was how to create a digital musical when all the scattered participants and parts have had to be assembled in lockdown.

Simon continues: 'How do you stage a musical on radio, and how do you record and put everything together in lockdown? Vital for a radio rendering of a story about virtual communication in the here and now are domestic sound effects of our time – mobile phones, voicemails, computer technology - but also of course home locations and some actuality sounds from outside too.

'Initially I had been thinking of a small-scale group of musicians akin to a theatre pit band, but as Theo and I were developing everything and so many churning emotional layers were exploding in his music as he played it to me on the piano, I began to hear a full-size orchestra in my mind.  

'I thought of the long shot of having the BBC Philharmonic as our main musical backdrop: which would be a short shot if we could record them in a studio - but in lockdown? Well, could it perhaps be conceivable that we might record all the players individually in their homes and somehow put everything together – the complete orchestra, the actor/singers, additional session and backing musicians, and all the sound effects – by very skilful post production? Imagine the odds against that task, but I believed that one special ace and vastly experienced producer, Steve Levine, could bring it off, and he has indeed surmounted the hurdles and achieved an amazing success. 

'And so the listening scale is rich and powerful, as well as intimate, and that ideally reflects the emotional range and situations in the story. I must also acknowledge other crucial participants: our brilliant dramaturg Alli Smith, who has kept us afloat, our wonderfully gifted actor singers Anoushka Lucas and Martin Sarreal in the two lead parts, our indispensable casting director Will Burton, and the incomparable Stephen Fry as our narrator. 

'Also, the outstanding players of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, playing all their individual parts so skilfully on their own in their homes, the greatly talented and generous backing singers and session musicians, and the highly gifted extras from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. And finally, an important additional dimension: for podcasting we’re creating an animation that runs through the entire 53 minutes of the piece.'

'If you come to the live world premiere on BBC World Service at 8.00pm UK time on the 12 May, you’ll be able to log in and watch the story told in animated form illustrated by a wonderful graphic artist Naomi Otsu and made at the award-winning Mighty Pie Creative Studio. It’s all about how we can come together again through art in a pandemic.'

For more information click here.