Celebrating 20 years of Chichester Festival Youth Theatre at Christmas

It all started with The Wizard Of Oz in 2003; it continues with The Jungle Book this year. Along the way there have been many, many highlights, not least Pinocchio which managed to triumph amid all the miseries of the pandemic.

Dale Rooks, director of learning, education and participation at Chichester Festival Theatre, has directed around three-quarters of the shows across the two decades: “And long may it continue. There is nothing more magical than seeing a group of young people take to the stage at Christmas and provide really, really high-quality work. They rise to the challenge. They're really lucky to be given an exceptional resource at the theatre, the same resource that we would give to any other show in the festival. And I think that’s unique about Chichester Festival Theatre. But the fact is that they rise to the challenge fantastically.

“I think it has been a huge achievement. Everybody says that time passes so quickly but it really does and when I think back to those first shows, it really does seem just like yesterday. 2003 was The Wizard of Oz, and that was the first big opportunity for the Youth Theatre to take to the main stage. Andy Brereton had been directing the youth theatre and he did a couple of youth theatre shows in the Minerva at Christmas. Then Andy decided that he wanted to start directing the professional shows and he gave me the opportunity to direct the Christmas show which was fabulous but then Ruth Mackenzie (co-artistic director at the time with Martin Duncan and Steven Pimlott) said ‘How about you do it on the main stage next year in 2003?’ She had seen productions that I had done in the Minerva of Street Child and The Silver Sword. I was both thrilled and daunted at the idea.

“Back then Ruth, Martin and Steven very much chose the title. I'm not sure that in 2003 we had the strong singers that we have now. We had not really focused on musical theatre so it was quite a challenge but I think it was great. It was a huge score and a lot of the emphasis was put on the quality of singing but it was totally joyous to hear them. I think the young people were a bit overwhelmed as well but also obviously very excited and from there we have built a tradition and I think it has become very popular.”

Finding a show that can accommodate such a large cast is inevitably part of the challenge for Dale and the team: “And we have actually repeated a couple of shows.” They did in fact repeat Pinocchio – but only because it was cut short by the latest lockdown to descend over Christmas 2020: “We went up to Christmas Eve and I was incredibly proud of that show just because we managed to keep going at a time when so many theatres around us were just collapsing. And we didn't have a single member of the cast that got Covid because we were so careful. We had two sets of 35 performing the show and they were socially distanced, but in some ways that made us so much more creative and inventive, and it just felt such a great thing to do, to find a way to get young people together again safely.”