Don't let Lee Mead hog the spotlight ... Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty
A professional stage version of Disney's High School Musical has just opened in London, while another company is simultaneously touring it around the country; but licenses have also been issued to more than 400 amateur companies throughout Britain to put it on as well since the rights were first made available to all comers. Disney, as canny marketers, have seen it not just as a people's musical whose popularity, from the first time it was screened as a made-for-TV movie on the Disney Channel in January 2006, has enabled it to be franchised as everything from a video game to a touring ice show spectacular. It has naturally welcomed the fact that the public wants a piece of it in every sense, so much so that they even want to be in it.
As Steve Fickinger, VP of Theatrical Licensing for Disney Theatrical Productions, told me a few months ago, "Once the TV film was shown, it was immediately popular and quite quickly a sensation, and not long after that a phenomenon. But no one knows what the shelf life of a phenomenon is going to be, so I wanted to be sure that by the fall of 2006 I had a stage adaptation ready for schools and amateur groups. We therefore took what would normally be an 18-month development period and compressed it into six months." He employed a new creative team to expand the film into a two-act show, and started marketing. "We put up a website to canvas interest, and immediately had 15,000 different enquiries."
The amateur versions quickly turned into a brand-building exercise, and one that has only helped the professional versions that have now followed acquire serious momentum, as those who have been in it will now want to see how it can be done professionally. It has long worked the same way for shows such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's first success, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which has built its popularity through school productions (for which it was first in fact written), and led to the current West End and touring productions being hits all over again, too.
No wonder that Lloyd Webber this week announced that The Likes of Us - the first show that he and Rice ever wrote, and hitherto only professionally produced in two one-off concert stagings in 2005 at his private Sydmonton Festival and subsequently at the Mermaid Theatre - is being released to the amateur market ahead of any possible professional interest. Amateur productions will be used to test both the show's viability and reach, away from the commercially exposed marketplace of the West End; not only does Lloyd Webber as producer not have to spend any money to put it on, he'll actually be paid by others for the privilege of them doing so, as they have to return 11% of the gross box office receipts in royalty payments.
But some projects are more altruistic. The National Theatre's annual New Connections season commissions established writers - who this year include Mark Ravenhill, Abi Morgan, Jack Thorne and Bryony Lavery - to write new plays specially to be performed by young people from youth and college groups around the country, with a production of each then coming to be showcased at the National itself. In 2006, the National then picked up three of these plays, Deborah Gearing's Burn, Enda Walsh's Chatroom, and Mark Ravenill's Citizenship, to give them full professional stagings, and then reprised the exercise earlier this year with Roy Williams' Baby Girl, Dennis Kelly's DNA and Lin Coghlan's The Miracle.
Drama schools are also increasingly being used to try out new work by leading theatre practitioners: LAMDA recently premiered a new play by Doug Lucie, and are about to stage a new verbatim project by Robin Soans under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark called Mixed-Up, based on the 2001 Burnley riots. Mark Ravenhill's Mother Clapp's Molly House, and a stage version of Remembrance of Things Past, were also both developed at LAMDA before they went on to full production at the National.
But this represents the work of aspiring professionals. The amateur market, on the other hand, inspires local communities to participate in the business of putting on theatre. Josef Weinberger, one of the leading licensing agents for the major musicals, issues around 3,000 amateur licenses a year for productions that vary in scale from primary schools to major societies, who will book the Liverpool Empire or Manchester Palace and fill it for a week.
The most popular, naturally, are familiar titles such as Annie, Oklahoma!, West Side Story, Guys and Dolls and Little Shop of Horrors, but Weinberger reports that the groups are always hungry for new product, too, so it has huge waiting lists for all the current top West End shows to be released. Next to the US, the UK is the biggest market for the production of musicals in the amateur sector, and this secondary market, as it's called, is a major revenue stream for the creators of musicals: while major revivals only come along occasionally, amateur productions keep the flame burning for them in between. Amateurs help the theatre and theatre-makers not only to survive, but also to thrive.
