The Secret Society of Leading Ladies | Review
February 22, 2021 Last updated:
March 14, 2021
I once turned down an invitation to something called Secret Cinema with the riposte, “
If it’s supposed to be a secret, why you are telling me about it?”
The Secret Society of Leading Ladies is an interesting concept, allowing audience members to choose with the click of a mouse which showtune they would like to see being performed, five times over. At first glance, it sounds like a recipe for technical glitches galore, but it all works very smoothly – or, to put it another way, it’s hardly the producers’ fault that I’m with Virgin Media.
The Secret Garden).
Ellison said: We re so excited to finally be able to release this album! Fans of the show have been asking for it since our run back in 2019 and I m so glad we were able to immortalise this production with a live recording. We feel so fortunate to have worked with this amazing cast and thank them for bringing our songs to life!
We decided we would only do the November concerts if they could be one hundred percent live. The original show at Southwark Playhouse had a lot of audience interaction so for the live-streamed concerts, we used social media to interact with people, meaning I could connect with and chat to them during the interval. Knowing we had three sound recordings from those concerts started the conversation about releasing a cast album. and we were determined to turn the incredible performances into a live cast recording.
Alex James Ellison and Tom Lees
Fiver, Stuart Matthew Price and Timothy Knapman s
Before After and Tim Gilvin s
Stay Awake, Jake, each of which were originally streamed live at the south London theatre, will now return for encore runs.
You can watch clips from
Before After and
Fiver below:
Fiver is performed by Luke Bayer, Dan Buckley, Aoife Clesham, Hiba Elchikhe and Alex James Ellison, while
Before After stars Rosalie Craig and Hadley Fraser and is directed by Matthew Rankcom.
Grace Taylor directs
Stay Awake, Jake, which stars Ahmed Hamad and has musical direction from Tamara Saringer, musical supervision by Nick Pinchbeck and orchestrations by Matthew Malone.