Delighted to see that Kim Criswell is back at Crazy Coqs, next to Brasserie Zedel, from 6^th – 8^th October. Her show is called Takin’ Stock 2: 30 Years Upon the Wicked Stages of Europe. Who can forget her portrayal of Italian diva Lucia Tivolini in Six Nights in Naples? Not me anyway. Enjoy her masterly performance and superb vocals and book up now to see Kim in action – live!

At the suggestion of Julian Slade’s family, I have adapted the script of his and Dorothy Reynolds’s 1957 hit musical Free as Air, with the aim of making it suitable for 21^st century audiences. Its music is every bit as lovely as that for Slade and Reynolds’s much better-known Salad Days, but the few professional revivals to date have been hampered by the need for a very large cast and, perhaps, an overly 1950s atmosphere. Now, without attempting to make it ‘contemporary’, I’ve tried to refashion the show for 12 actor-musicians, so that its charm and glorious melodies can come alive again. That’s the idea anyway!

In the middle of their huge success with Guys & Dolls, Nick Hytner’s team at London’s Bridge Theatre have found time to read and listen to The Postman & the Poet. On top of a positive reaction from Nick when he was running the Royal National Theatre, the Bridge’s Head of Development, Will Mortimer, now adds, “We very much enjoyed reading and listening to the work – it’s a terrific story and very beautifully realised in your adaptation.” 

Delighted, and very proud, to see that Chris Bush won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical on 2^nd April. Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which came from Sheffield Crucible to the National Theatre, was a worthy winner. Having followed her work since her childhood, it has been great to see how it has developed all the way to this award. She came to see The Postman and the Poet when it was workshopped at The Other Palace a few years ago and I look forward to seeing her community play, based on Homer’s Odyssey at the RNT soon.

Sunday Times theatre critic and Times columnist Quentin Letts writes to say he likes the idea of the ‘Il Postino musical’, better known to its authors, me and Michael Jeffrey, as The Postman and the Poet. He describes the project as ‘eminently stageable.’ Here’s hoping he gets the opportunity to review it in the near future, perhaps at one of his local theatres, The Barn in Cirencester.

News just in: a producer in Santiago, described by friends as ‘the Chilean Cameron Mackintosh’, likes The Postman and the Poet so much he is having the book and lyrics translated into Spanish. What could be better than a musical set in Chile, with a Chilean story featuring the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, opening in Chile’s capital city? So buoyant are audiences there that theatres have shows queuing to open. Postman is about the become one of them.