Adam Lenson, the director of Cable Street, Public Domain and The Rink, and the founder of the SIGNAL concerts for new musical writing, has died aged 41.
The director Adam Lenson has died at the age of 41. Almost all of his career was given to new musicals, which he directed, developed, produced, showcased and wrote about, and a large share of that work was made in London's smaller producing houses rather than the West End.
His wife, Emma Jude Harris, has written his obituary for The Stage. In it she presents a man whose work went beyond the rehearsal room: an activist, a connector of artists, a campaigner for the musical as a form, and a designer of new technologies for the stage.
Southwark Playhouse was the address he returned to most often. He directed Wasted, The Rink, Superhero and The Fabulist Fox Sister there, and staged Public Domain both at Southwark and at the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End. Cable Street, the musical set around the 1936 stand by East End residents against Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, was staged under his direction both there and at the Marylebone Theatre. His more recent work included Flyby by Theo Jamieson, again at Southwark Playhouse, on which he was director, video designer and co-creator.
His other London credits included Ordinary Days at Trafalgar Studios, See What I Wanna See at the Jermyn Street Theatre, Little Fish at the Finborough Theatre, and Songs for a New World, Whisper House and 35MM at The Other Palace. He also worked as an associate and assistant director alongside John Doyle, Stephen Daldry, Terry Johnson, Nancy Meckler, Victoria Wood and Maria Friedman, at houses including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Old Vic and Hampstead Theatre. He read Natural Sciences at Queens' College, Cambridge, and trained on the National Theatre Studio's directors' course.
Away from directing, he founded ALP Musicals, a production company for new work shaped by its writers and performers rather than by convention, and SIGNAL, a concert series that gave composers and lyricists a stage on which to try out new material, in person and online. He made work of his own too: his solo show Is It Too Late Now to Say Sorry? premiered at Summerhall during the Edinburgh Fringe, and his book Breaking into Song: Why You Shouldn't Hate Musicals, published by Salamander Street, made the case for the form to readers inclined to dismiss it.
Best of Theatre followed his revival of The Rink in 2018, when the full cast was announced for its Southwark Playhouse run. Tributes from writers, musicians and companies across the industry have followed the news of his death.
