Will Jackson and Ellinor Peregin have been announced as the winners of the 2025 New Music Theatre Award for their new folk musical, Sea Change.
The Birmingham-based duo’s project will focus on a group of selkies, mythical Celtic shapeshifters, who cause havoc in a seaside community. Composer Peregrin and book writer Jackson (who will share lyric writing duties) will now develop the full musical for performance by British Youth Music Theatre in 2026.
The announcement came at the end of BYMT’s Let it Snow event at Woolwich Works in London, the charity’s annual celebration of all the original musicals it has mounted throughout the year. BMYT’s claim to be the largest commissioner of new musicals in the UK was certainly in evidence, with casts of young people performing excerpts from the six new works staged over the year.
Reimagining could be said to be a theme of the year, with half of the shows drawing inspiration from real-life events. The Naughty Carriage on the Orphan Train by Luke Saydon and Carl Miller is set aboard a fictionalised train carrying children to a new life. It is inspired by the real-life Orphan Train movement in the US during the late 19th and early 20th century, but also evokes images of WWII evacuees or the Kindertransport.
Evie Press and Evie Atkins’s Choreomania headed back even further, to 16th-century Strasbourg and the “dancing plague” that saw up to 400 people dancing continuously for weeks. Press and Atkins imagine that the Strasbourg residents start their dance as a form of protest against the Church and its abuse of town funds. Protest is also the theme of Worn Out by Zoe Morris and Meg McGrady, which reinterprets a Grimm Brothers fairy tale as a story of female rebellion.
While stories of outward rebellion clearly appeal to the young people who sign up and audition for BYMT’s workshops and productions, so too does the rather more personal tale of Theo In Between. Gareth Mattey and Jordan Li-Smith’s musical follows a non-binary teen coming to terms with their gender identity in the Northern England town of Dullsville, with the score drawing inspiration from 90s and 00s pop and musicals.
Perhaps the two strongest works in BYMT’s 2025 season are the shows chosen to conclude each act. Grace O’Keefe and Thomas F Arnold’s Sense and Sensibility takes Jane Austen’s novel and, by mere act of casting sisters Marianne and Elinor closer to their age in the novel, refocuses the plight of the Dashwood sisters into a coming-of-age story for the ages. The emphasis on English folk – the production at Exeter’s Barnfield Theatre included an onstage maypole dance – produces some delightful tunes, and one could quite imagine A Spring Day in Devon performed by adult choirs as a standalone choral work.
The final show presentation of the evening saves the best for last. The Glamification of Loki was 2024’s recipient of the NMTA award and received a full-length premiere at Southwark Playhouse Elephant this August. Eden Tredwell’s comic fantasy, which sees the Norse gods descend upon an Earth-bound cosmetics company selling the deities’ secret of eternal youth, is a romp that pays tribute to the joys of musical theatre and is delightfully funny in its own right.
If there is any justice, The Glamification of Loki will have a life beyond BYMT’s two-day run. But it also sets the bar for future NMTA recipients. Assuming Jackson and Peregrin can match their predecessor’s quality level, Sea Change could be magical indeed.
