'Two acts full of music with powerful lyrics make the whole play addictive...a really funny, upbeat musical which I would highly recommend, and would see again in a heartbeat.' - Everything Theatre
Amidst the social revolution, colourful fashion and vibrant music of the late 1960s, Kathy Brown has spent so much time attending protest marches that she is suspended from Oxford University. Through the ‘renowned scholastic agency of Grabitall and Tring’, she finds employment as the Lower Fifth form tutor at Ruffwood Park, a girls’ school untouched by the swinging sixties. Will Kathy ever be able to get through to the unruly Lower Fifth form? Will they ever want to learn anything? And will the fearsome headmistress Miss de Trique’s reign of terror ever come to an end?
GRRRLZ is an original musical comedy for an almost entirely female cast, drawing its inspiration from musicians as diverse as Aretha Franklin, Louis Armstrong and Gilbert & Sullivan; its richly comic plot from a unique blend of Pythonesque farce, schoolgirls straight out of St Trinians, and Cold War espionage; and its setting from late 1960s politics of anti-Establishment counterculture and second-wave Feminism.
Originally written and filmed during the Covid pandemic of 2020-21 with a cast of fourteen schoolgirls and released as four half-hour episodes on YouTube, GRRRLZ was adapted for the Oxford-based DIY Theatre Company on 29-31 October 2021, with a cast of over thirty and an eight-piece band. GRRRLZ was subsequently adapted for a cast of twelve for its London debut at the Etcetera Theatre, Camden on 17-18 December 2021. GRRRLZ is suitable for all ages and has a running time of 100 minutes, plus interval.