Theatre in the Park, a temprorary state-of-the-art auditorium, will stage two productions at the heart of Chichester's Festival 2013. The brand new space is being erected while the £22 million RENEW redevelopment of the Fesstival Theatre continues.
Mirroring the Festival Theatre's auditorium, the purpose-built temporary building will house 1,400 seats and a thrust stage. It is just a few minutes stroll across Oaklands Park from the Festival Theatre site.
Unveiled with a major revival of the musical Barnum presented in association with Cameron Mackintosh, this production will star the versatile Broadway entertainer Christopher Fitzgerald in the title role. It will be directed by Timothy Sheader, Artistic Director of Regent's Park Open Air Theatre.
For the second production, Angus Jackson will direct Neville's Island, Tim Firth's comedy about a disastrous outward bound expediction which promises to be a technically- and visually-ambitious staging.
The new Barnum will show us much more than Barnum the showman. "Although best known for the Barnum and Bailey Circus, he did not go into circuses until his sixties," Mackintosh explains.
"Before that he had entered politics in his native Connecticut and fought for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights, set up newspapers, founded hospitals, improved the water supply and was the first person to bring opera to the masses in the shape of Jenny Lind the 'Swedish Nightingale', more than 100 years before Pavarotti".
He was also famous in his day for Barnum's American Museum of oddities, such as General Tom Thumb, 'the smallest person that ever walked alone".
Christopher Fitzgerald "has been imbued with circus since he was five years old," and Mackintosh believes he has all the qualities the part requires.
Co-director and choreographer Liam Steel comes straight from the film of Les Miserables and co-choreographer Andrew Wright was Olivier Award nominated for Festival 2011's Singin' in the Rain, while Bill Brohn, whose theatrical career started with Miss Saigon will completely reinvent the score of Barnum, he said "Did I tell you I started off writing music for circus?"
Barnum enthusiasiast Jonathan Church has for several years thought about bringin it back nearly three decades after its last outing: "the fact that we can do it in Theatre in the Park was never planned, but it's the ideal venue. Pure serendipity; but I always believe in the fates and the flip of a coin is one of the themes throughout the story of Barnum".
Reconstructing a musical spectacular about the inventor of the three-ringed circus in a vast theatrical tent has been a great journey so far for Cameron Mackintosh and his team. "We are all looking forward so much to coming to Chichester and to "Follow the Band" all over again.