Eastern promise

Is it really panto time? “Oh yes it is!” OK, that’s enough of that routine for now, there’ll be plenty of chances to belt it out in full in the weeks ahead.

As usual, the first panto to open in Oxfordshire will be at The Theatre, Chipping Norton, and preparations for Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves were in full swing when I visited. An exotic set depicting a Middle Eastern souk was being built up on stage, and in the auditorium composer Sarah Travis was taking the cast through a bouncy chorus number.

Sarah returned to the Chippy panto (as the Chipping Norton show is always called) in 2010 after several years away working on a string of highly successful musicals at the Newbury Watermill with director John Doyle, and Strictly Come Dancing’s Craig Revel Horwood. She won the stage equivalent of an Oscar, a Best Orchestrations Tony Award, for the Watermill’s Sweeney Todd when it transferred to Broadway.

But it was in Chipping Norton that her career as a composer and arranger really began.

“I started as an accompanist, and I toured to Chipping Norton with Dillie Keane, from Fascinating Aida,” Sarah explained. “It must have been in the early 1990s. I was talking to Tamara Malcolm [founder director of The Theatre] in the bar afterwards, and she said: ‘Do you write music, do you compose?’ I suppose I’d written a couple of bits and bobs at that stage, and suddenly she said: ‘Would you like to write our pantomime music this year?’ I knew nothing about the Chippy panto at that point, but her invitation was what got me composing. I’ve learnt so much here, I was very green to start with.

“These days I do more orchestration — actor-musician shows, like those at the Watermill, where the actors also play the instruments, take a lot of time to score. So it’s really nice to come back to writing: it’s joyous to do, and doesn’t feel like work.”

How, I asked Sarah, does she come up with ideas?

“Sometimes I sit at the piano, and a song will just come. But I tend to start with the lyrics — the scriptwriter, Ben Crocker, will give me a hook line, or he might write the words for a whole song, then I’ll come up with an idea. We do most of it by email, but he’s been to my home in Hastings, and I’ve been to his house in Devon for conflabs.

“We both love surfing, so we’ll go for a surf in the morning, then start work.

“Some songs naturally have a style. There’s a moment in this show when Kaseem meets his sorry demise at the end of Act One, and gets chopped into four pieces.

“In Act Two he gets sewn back together again, and comes back to life. But the sewing is a bit wonky, so we felt it would be really nice if he had a song called Right Along the Seam. Then I thought: ‘Maybe he’s a bit of a song and dance man’, so he’s got a big Fred Astaire number, similar to Dancing Cheek to Cheek.”

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves runs at The Theatre, Chipping Norton, from November 22 to January 7. Visit www.chippingnorton theatre.com or call 01608 642350.