Youth Music Theatre UK
Between July 2008 and March 2012, Griffiths became Operations Manager for Youth Music Theatre: UK and managed their 2008 Summer productions which included Marie Jones' The Chosen Room at Belfast, Terry Pratchett' Mort at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford and Nick Stimson and Jimmy Jewell's production of Peter Pan at the Barbican, Plymouth. YMT's production of Conor Mitchell and Kath Burlinson’s Missing Mel transferred to the Cochrane Theatre in the West End in October 2008.
Griffiths' Summer 2009 productions included A Winter's Tale by Howard Goodall and Nick Stimson at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, Loserville: The Musical by James Bourne and Elliot Davis directed by Steven Dexter at the South Hill Park Arts Centre in Bracknell with Mamma Mia! Musical Director Martin Lowe and second year developments of Marie Jones' The Chosen Room in Belfast and Peter Pan at the Aberdeen International Youth Festival. YMT also commissioned four new musicals called Fool's Gold and According to Brian Haw...? at the Barbican, Plymouth,The Watchers at the Bradford Playhouse and EIGHT at Casterton in Cumbria. In December 2009, Peter Pan transferred to the Bridewell Theatre, London for a short pre-Christmas run.
In February 2010, Griffiths appeared on S4C's early evening TV show 'Wedi 7' to promote YMT's 2010 Cardiff Auditions.
YMT's 2010 Summer productions, which Griffiths oversaw, included further development of Nick Stimson and Jimmy Jewell's Peter Pan alongside their new interpretation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera at South Hill Park Arts Centre in Bracknell with Choreographer David Leighton. Other projects included Jenifer Toksvig's adaptation of David Almond's children's novel, The Savage in Casterton, Cumbria; Scheherazade at the Bradford Playhouse; A Song for Eurydice at the Barbican Plymouth and a sequel to the 2009 production of the vampire musical The Watchers called Ghosts of the Past at the Aberdeen International Youth Festival. Conor Mitchell's The Dummy Tree originally commissioned by the National Theatre's Connections Festival and presented by YMT members in 2009, ran for 2 weeks at London's Tristan Bates Theatre.
2011 saw further developments of Terry Pratchett' Mort, a new musical version of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Out There by James Bourne and Elliot Davis directed by Steven Dexter who gave YMT Loserville: The Musical in 2009. YMT's 2011 flagship show was Korczak based on the life and work of Janusz Korczak at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. YMT also visited the Aberdeen International Youth Festival with a new show by Kath Burlinson called Tales of the World's End and two shows in Plymouth, Love and Madness and Jabberwocky based on an adaptation of Jabberwocky.
In August 2011, Griffiths and the Korczak company were featured on S4C's 'Wedi 7' to promote the show. He resigned from the charity in March 2012, due to illness.
Read more about this topic: Paul Griffiths (director)
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“So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)