Olivier Award-Winner ‘Standing At The Sky’s Edge’ Reveals West End Transfer
03.04.2023 - 10:31
/ deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which won best musical at the Olivier Awards Sunday night, will transfer to the West End’s Gillian Lynne Theatre early in 2024, Deadline can reveal.
The show written by playwright Chris Bush, featuring rock songs from the catalog of Richard Hawley, moves into the Gillian Lynne from February for an initial six-month season.
It won two prizes at Sunday’s ceremony: the all-important best musical honor and original score or new orchestrations for Hawley’s music and lyrics and Tom Deering’s orchestrations.
The story is set in Park Hill, a brutalist apartment block built in the early 1960s, and follows three families who occupy one particular flat at different periods over six decades. Hawley describes it as a “love letter” to his hometown of Sheffield in South Yorkshire.
Standing at the Sky’s Edge played two seasons at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and then a six-week run at the National Theatre in London, which ended nine days ago. It played on the NT’s Olivier main stage to audience numbers of over 50,000, according to Rupert Lord of Various Productions who came up with the original idea.
Lord took his project to Sheffield Theaters, then run by Daniel Evans, who has since run Chichester Festival Theatre and is about to take the helm at the Royal Shakespeare Company as co-artistic director. He will be joined by Tamara Harvey from Theatr Clwyd.
“People physically queued up for day seats from pre-dawn for last-minute tickets and this happened in the age of online ticket purchasing,” Lord said.
The National scrambled to get as many people in to see it as possible and there wasn’t a single empty seat or standing space during the entire run. “They were selling standing-only tickets