'The Music Would Stick With Me for The Rest of My Life': Guest Blog by Producer Blair Russell on The Long Road to Bring FOR TONIGHT to the Stage

When the curtain rises on the opening night of a new show the audience often has no idea how the show ended up there. The path to developing new musicals is not very clear, even to people who work in theatre, but the best shows need time, lots of money, and an ever-growing group of hard-working individuals devoted to seeing them succeed. 

I remember the exact moment when I heard the first demo of For Tonight, I was working as an assistant to producers at a theatre in the US, and I knew I was hearing music that would stick with me for the rest of my life. The show at that point was still new and in its early days of development. The writers had presented a private concert in a backyard in California, and they had played the New York Musical Theatre Festival the year before.

At that point, I did even know I was going to be a producer in the future, but a few years, and a few jobs later when I decided to strike out on my own as an independent producer I was going through my memory banks to think about projects I was interested in and For Tonight was at the top of that list.

I didn't really have a set plan for what was next other than knowing I wanted to support the show so it could be seen by as wide an audience as possible. I certainly didn’t know we’d be playing the West End one day.

I started working as the lead producer of For Tonight, but of course all of that was derailed by the pandemic in March of 2020. At the time it felt like all of the opportunities for the show went away in an instant, but it actually ended up being valuable for us as a team because it forced us to take a closer look at the work and get creative with our next steps. Spencer and Shenelle, the writers, approached me about putting together a concept recording for the show. I thought it sounded impossible given the circumstances, but found a music producer, Joseph Purdue, who said he could put it all together remotely, and that’s exactly what we did.

We went to work on this concept album, with our cast at home in their bedrooms in England, Scotland, and Wales, and our team in the US. It was the first time we would hear it fully orchestrated as intended, and when I heard the first cut of the opening song, "Away", with those beautiful voices and instruments it gave me the same thrill I had when I first heard those original scratch demos years before. Reviews were positive, streams flowed in, we were played on Elaine Paige’s BBC 2 Radio Show, it was such a bright moment in a difficult time.

Even remotely across continents, it was so helpful to lean heavily into that community of performers. That experience reinforced what we suspected, which is just how valuable having an authentic eye on a work can be, not only from a social-cultural standpoint but even more so from an artistic one. It has been nothing shy of transformative for the work.

Last summer, we put together a two-week workshop bringing new people into the room alongside some of the cast from the concept album with our amazing Welsh director Nick Evans.  We’ve continued to develop the music and worked on the script with Raine Geoghegan who is a Welsh-Romani poet, artist, dancer, and theatremaker. We first connected with Raine in 2020 and she has been gracious enough to join our team and guide and educate us about the Romani people and culture and help us to bring as much authenticity to this piece.

People often asked me what makes a “good” show, and my go to answer has always been “ I like traditional stories told in new ways and new stories told in traditional ways.” For Tonight sits right in the intersection of those two things. Like many classic musicals it has this grand vision, an expansive story, and a sweeping orchestral score. On the other hand it contains so many elements that we’ve never seen on the musical theatre stage before, from cultures that have never been at the forefront, to the incorporation of two additional languages into the script.

For all my vision boarding, I can never predict what the future will be for a show but I hope one day to see For Tonight as a fully-fledged show on West End stage and around the UK, maybe even around the world.

In the show when asked where she comes from the character of Mirela says “We belong to the lungo drom” which in the Romani language means the long road. The same can be said of our show, from a backyard in California to the Adelphi in London we continue to be somewhere on the lungo drom.

We hope you’ll come along on the journey.

The new musical For Tonight by Shenelle Salcido and Spencer Williams plays a one-night-only staged concert on September 5 at the Adelphi Theatre.

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