Once In A While
A History
My show has been 40 years in the making starting in 1981 while I was teaching in Nottingham. Like so many inspirational ideas ‘it’ happened upon me and I was compelled to write it down. As writers know, ideas don’t wait for an appropriate moment to arrive so I found myself writing while in my car in traffic jams, late at night as I was dropping off to sleep and so on. The songs appeared in the style of that great heart throb of the 1930s – Ivor Novello who was a composer and creator of wonderful and hugely popular musicals.
I completed it by 1984 but had no idea what to do with it so it went into a box file. Then in 1989 I took it out, made a tape recording of a dramatic precis of the story accompanied by some of the songs and entered it into the Buxton Festival. This was when the name was born suggested by the late, great and hugely talented, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, Needless to say, the competition was fierce and, really, the whole thing wasn’t complete anyway, so along with a rather lukewarm letter from the competiton panel, it went back into the box file and stayed there.
Then in December 2023 a friend persuaded me to take it out of the box file and we organise a table read with actor friends. The evening was a success and two people very involved in the theatre world, Dave Phipps and Chris Huntley, stepped forward and offered to help me develop it. You can read about in their interesting biographies in another section
All through 2023 Dave, my dramaturg, helped me to work on the story by developing the original ideas and adding new characters and songs to punctuate the plot of comedy, romance and dilemma. Chris, my Musical Director, was at hand to arrange the new tunes resulting in Draft 2 of the show. Having discovered the show would be far too long for, even the kindest audience to endure, more refinement was needed until the final draft of Once in a While (originally entitled Dear Bernard) was born.
Jane Morgan
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About Jane Morgan
I have spent the best part of 45 years teaching music in Nottingham and in inner London where I have been able to enhance, encourage and make the most of the talents of my students ranging from 2 years right through to older people. It has been hugely rewarding and enjoyable and now I am, mostly retired, I have been using my time to develop ideas and music I have written over the years both in and outside my career.
Between 1983 and 1984 I wrote Dear Bernard (now entitled Once in a While), inspired by the music of Ivor Novello, and it has been lying in a box file until the Spring of 2023 when I found some professionals to help me develop the whole story and the music I have written. We have been working on this pretty intensively since then.
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An Arts Council grant would help me enormously to prepare Once in a While for a concert performance in the Spring of 2025 and, hopefully, a production later in 2026.
Though I have written, directed and produced school shows and borough-wide performances during my career I am a novice in the theatre world. However I have been lucky enough to have met professionals to help me. At the moment I am funding the whole initial process myself and your bursary would be an enormous help to realise my ‘dream’ and enable professionals to work on and perform a new and up-beat original idea with some good tunes!