Spring Awakening Team Craft Alice Musical for NT???

Multi award-winning authors of Spring Awakening Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik are currently workshopping their new musical Alice by Heart at the National Theatre. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the production has been commissioned by the National’s annual Connections festival, a country-wide event that reaches out to the youth theatres with new writing. Playbill report that director-screenwriter Jessie Nelson is currently directing a two-week London workshop with a group of young actors cast through Youth Music Theatre UK with Lance Horne as the musical director. The writing duo hope to complete script and score by July prior to a presentation at the National in November. It is hoped the show will be included in next year’s Connections festival line-up which would see the piece performed by youth theatres across the UK in February 2012 prior to one production being selected to come to the National in the summer. Speaking to Playbill about Alice by Heart Sater said: “It’s about how to leave childhood behind and the challenge and struggle in that.” The collaborators have hinted they are hoping for a wider commercial production of Alice by Heart following its youth theatre premiere.

Spring Awakening, which explored similar themes of adolescent angst and a loss of childhood innocence, won Shiek and Sater eight 2007 Tony Awards in addition to the four Olivier Awards, including Best New Musical, it scooped for its London production.