VIDEOS: Computer-Generated Musical BEYOND THE FENCE Prepares For Opening

Back in December of 2015, BroadwayWorld reported on a unique experiment where an international team of scientists fed data pertaining to some of Broadway and London's most successful musicals into computer systems used to make creative decisions about the book, music and lyrics.

The musical that came out as a result, BEYOND THE FENCE, is now in rehearsals for a February 22nd - March 5th run at London's Arts Theatre, directed by Luke Sheppard and choreographed by Cressida Carre.

The process, as explained on beyondthefencemusical.com, began with scientists. Dr. James Robert Lloyd, Dr. Alex Davies and Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter (Cambridge University), who conducted a data analysis of success in musical theatre. (The language used in promotional material stresses the goal to write a "hit" musical rather than what might be considered an artistically good musical.) They considered cast size, backdrop, emotional structure and the importance of someone falling love and/or dying to create a set of constraints to which the musical had to conform in order to, theoretically, be successful.

Their data was taken to what's known as the What-If Machine at Goldsmiths, University of London. Under the guidance of Prof. Simon Colton, Dr. Maria Teresa Llano and Dr. Rose Hepworth, the machine generated multiple central premises and main characters. The team selected this as the starting point and the original idea for the musical:

What if a wounded soldier had to learn how to understand a child in order to find true love?

Dr. Pablo Gervás (Complutense University of Madrid) helped generate a plot structure utilizing a new analysis of musical theatre narratives that enabled him to adapt an existing story-telling computer system, called PropperWryter, to build a narrative arc.

All of this information enabled the team to identify a suitable setting, Greenham Common, the Royal Air Force base that from 1981-2000 was the site of the Women's peace camp, a protest against the decision of the British government to allow cruise missiles to be based there.

The book and lyrics, fitted to these constraints, were written with the assistance of other computational tools. Set in September 1982, BEYOND THE FENCE tells the story of Mary and her daughter George who are celebrating one year of living at the Greenham Common peace camp. The group of women they have joined are all committed to stopping the arrival of US cruise missiles through non-violent protest. When Mary is faced with losing her child to the authorities, an unlikely ally is found in US Airman Jim Meadow.

Music was provided by Dr. Nick Collins' (Durham University) computer composition system he calls Android Lloyd Webber based on a machine listening analysis of musical theatre music, conducted by Dr. Bob Sturm (QMUL) and Dr. Tillman Weyde (City University). Additional computer music material will be generated using the FlowComposer system created by Dr. Pierre Roy and Dr. Francois Pachet (SonyCSL, Paris).

The BEYOND THE FENCE cast includes CJ Johnson, Ako Mitchelland, Laura Jane Matthewson, Christine Allado, Rebecca Brewer, Leonie Elliott, Llio Millward, Michelle Moran, Annie Wensak, Rob Castell, Steffan Lloyd-Evans and Guy Mott, Hollie Owen and Zaiya Omamori. The following videos show glimpses of rehearsals with company members' impressions of this unusual collaboration.