Exciting news from Brighton People’s Theatre

We’re very happy to announce that we’ve been awarded project funding from Arts Council England and seed commissioning from Brighton Festival to research and develop (R&D) our next show, The Songbird Café. It will be a family-friendly musical touring to parks across Brighton & Hove during Brighton Festival 2023.

We co-created the concept for The Songbird Café with our members, starting with our People’s Inspiration Meeting in 2019. We brought people together to decide on themes pre-pandemic and continued with more in-depth workshops around ideas on Zoom earlier this year.

We want our set to be an actual cafe in the day. At night it will transform into the magical set for The Songbird Café. We don’t know what the story is going to be or who the characters are yet.

We do know that at some point we want the audience to sing together and dance together.

Everything is going to be co-created by our members and professional artists next year.

We want it to be a joyous show, bringing people together after what has been one hell of a ride through covid. There will be lots of opportunities for people in Brighton & Hove to get involved and we’ll be sharing details of how, as well as announcing the creative team in mid November. Sign up to our mailing list here to be the first to know.

The show will explore themes around loneliness, isolation, and the mental health crisis. This is what our members have told us is most pressing and important to them right now. But we will be co-creating an imaginary world with them and our creative team to explore these themes in a magical, uplifting way. We want The Songbird Cafe to be a good night out for all the family.

To make it covid safe, the show will take place outdoors thanks to support from Leeds-based theatre company Slung Low who are lending us their headphones for the R&D.
And we are super excited to be rehearsing over four weekends at The Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA) in the New Year.

We will evaluate this new approach to co-creating with local people and share what we learn on a Zoom with others in the industry in May.

If you are interested in finding out more about how to get involved in the project or want to keep up to date with how it evolves, sign up to our mailing list here.

We recruiting for a Producer and a Composer to support the project – find out more about both roles here.

We would like to say a massive thank you to our funders and partners Arts Council England, Brighton Festival, ACCA, and Slung Low for believing in us and supporting this project.

Come and play.