MUSIC-PLAYS - A new theatrical genre
The 'Music-Play' is an extremely flexible new form, which can be done with a minimum of 1 actor and 1 musician, as well as with a full orchestra and several actors, with an equally moving effect guaranteed.
Bright Stars Shone for Us, about Tchaïkovsky, also requires a dancer.
The 1 actor / 1 musician formula creates a very intimate and profound experience.
The full orchestra formula lets the audience enjoy the music at its fullest, creating a breathtaking effect.

Tama Matheson taking bow Alexander Shelley Conductor Midsummer Nights Dream RPO Cadogan Hall

Tama Matheson Beethoven I Shall Hear in Heaven love scene

Tama Matheson Beethoven I Shall Hear in Heaven

Tama Matheson taking bow Alexander Shelley Conductor Midsummer Nights Dream RPO Cadogan Hall
"The Music-Play is unlike anything else on the market. Cinematic in scope, and powerfully immersive, this fresh and exciting performance genre is a heady fusion of theatre and orchestral music – an electrifying mix of art-forms that plunges the audience into a dramatically realized living sound-world, and envelops them in a profoundly immersive experience. The Music-Play represents a new and heightened genre of theatrical performance, where music amplifies words, and words concentrate music – the effect of which is to give the audience the feeling of being inside not a play, but a movie – the soundtrack existing all around them, and driving the emotional heartbeat of the drama. Yet, unlike a movie, the music of the Music-Play frequently takes over the storytelling, and carries the audience to the next dramatic event on a cushion of audible emotion. The Music-Play is thus, in essence, the conflation of a fully-realised theatre play (complete with sets, costumes, and lighting) with a full orchestral concert – each art-form boosting the intensity of the other: music adding emotional dynamism to the text, and text adding meaning and richness to the music. With neither art form predominating, the two combine into a singing totality that leaves the audience breathless. The Music-Play is poised to become a major new genre in the world of theatre and music."
- interview from Times of Malta

Passions : the Life of J.S. Bach (full play)
Barnes Music Festival
A riveting dramatization of the life of the greatest of all composers, Passions charts the development of one of the most extraordinary individuals in Western Music. Seated amidst a concert of his own incomparable music, Johann Sebastian is a hilarious, fascinating, and deeply moving ramble through a life full of joy, confusion, tragedy, and triumph, leaving its audiences with a shimmering picture of one of the world’s most indispensable artists.

Tchaïkovsky - Bright Stars Shone for Us (full play)
First performed with the Camarata, Brisbane
This Music-Play presents some of the composer’s best-loved compositions amid a moving dramatisation of his extraordinary life: Bright Stars is a thrilling journey through Tchaikovsky’s musical and emotional world.
"A night of wonderful music and moving storytelling… absolutely stunning… brilliant in every way… what a night, what a concert… reduced me to tears more than once… heart-achingly beautiful…" Audience member

Don Juan - The Brilliant Irreverence of Lord Byron
Australia Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville
The thrilling, irreverent, poignant, and hilarious life of one the greatest personalities of the Romantic era: Lord Byron, as refracted through his hilarious autobiographical poem, Don Juan. Bursting with wit and originality, this play shows Byron at his most abundant: dazzling, passionate, and outrageous.
The drama is accompanied by the pianist Clare Hammond for a captivating duo of music and drama.

Beethoven - I Shall Hear in Heaven
OSO Art Center, London
Tama Matheson breathes life into the tortured composer, presenting a man of deeply human qualities, who wore heavily the burden of his own genius and who, despite the frangible condition of his own mortality, pushed the world of music to a blazing new level.

Prokofiev - The Wandering Tower
Wimbledon International Music Festival
In this thrilling and deeply moving Music-Play, Sergei Prokofiev's strange, eventful history is told amid a scintillating smorgasbord of his music. In The Wandering Tower we see the story of one of classical music’s greatest storytellers - a man who, having found fame and success in Europe and America, returned to Russia a cultural hero - only to find repression and authoritarianism bearing down on his creativity, and curtailing his genius.

The White Mouse - NancyWake
OSO Art Center
The White Mouse tells the story of one of the greatest heroines of World War II, the unparalleled British-Australian soldier, Nancy Wake.
The inspiration for Sebastian Faulks’s Charlotte Grey, Nancy was the allies’ most decorated service woman in WWII.
Hard-drinking, rough-talking, fearless, gritty, and tough, Nancy became the Gestapo’s no. 1 most wanted spy for the whole duration of the war, with a 5-million-franc bounty on her head.
Able to out-drink the boys, out-swear her comrades, and out-think the enemy, Nancy Wake was a soldier unlike any other.
By turns hilarious, thrilling, and devastating – and told through a dazzling combination of theatre and music The White Mouse will take you on a theatrical journey unlike any other.