End of year News from Lewis

Hello!

It’s been a while since we posted a newsletter; however, 2025 has been an extraordinary year for Forth Children’s Theatre. For the first time we produced three productions, with a beautiful revival of The Sound of Music in Easter, a simply incredible production of School of Rock during the Fringe and a festive outing to MacCarnival’s circus with Goldilocks & The Three Bears.

We are all still reeling from the incredible performance our young people gave at this year’s Fringe. It’s safe to say that ‘School of Rock’ was a monumental production in many ways, with loads of new faces joining our family, a live band on stage, one of the largest production budgets to date, two five-star reviews, and sold-out houses across the week. We are very proud of everyone involved, from our front-of-house volunteers to our backstage crew, our band, and, of course, our dedicated creative team. School of Rock signifies a huge milestone for Forth Children’s Theatre; after a long road, we believe we have fully recovered from the generational gap that COVID-19 presented, with huge interest gathering in our programming and opportunities for young people.

In 2022, we had a successful run of a pantomime production of ‘Beauty & The Beast’ at Ocean Terminal - this year, we brought back festive programming to FCT in the form of ‘Goldilocks & The Three Bears’, a fun-filled circus extravaganza, which played North Edinburgh Arts the last week in November. This production’s purpose was to bring down our usual scale and help fundraise for our blockbuster 2026 programming. This original production allowed our young people to experience something different, whilst still bringing the heart expected with any FCT production. Thank you to all our volunteers, crew, and creatives who brought this production to fruition. It was a chaotic yet lovely week at North Edinburgh Arts.

Speaking of 2026 - it’s shaping up to be a CRACKER! Our young people voted for Sister Act as their 2026 Easter Show during our show selection workshop at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 2024. Now planning is firmly underway to bring a fabulous production of this iconic hit (which we previously presented at the 2018 Fringe) to audiences. Seasoned FCT veteran Taylor Doig returns to direct this production, accompanied by Mirrin Macleay as Choreographer (hot off the tracks of School of Rock & The Sound of Music), and FCT alumni Roisin Caulfield as Musical Director. The cast are waiting in the wings in anticipation to bring you a new revival of the much loved story of Deloris Van Cartier. Make sure you get your tickets when they become available!

During this year’s show selection workshop at the Festival Theatre our young people chose FCT’s programming for the next three years. A late edition to the line-up was Disney’s Frozen which was the overwhelming favourite for our Fringe 2026 slot! We have never tackled Disney before in FCT’s history, apart from a wee bit of Mary Poppins during our 45th Anniversary Gala at the Church Hill, therefore this is going to be a huge production to bring to the masses next August, but we are sure our young people are well and truly up for the challenge. This month we will begin recruitment for a bold, collaborative and talented creative team to ensure that we bring Anna and Elsa to the stage in all their cookie and icy glory. If you know of anyone interested in joining our creative team for next fringe, make sure they keep their eyes peeled on our socials for the creative call!

For the productions in 2027 and beyond? Well all we’ll say is our young people have excellent taste and we have an incredible artistic future lined-up. We are really excited at how far we’ve come since 2021, and the future that lies ahead of us.

We want to continue growing and developing our amazing charity with the times so that we can offer young people more opportunities on and off stage. If you know of anyone aged 10-18 who would love to perform with us, please keep an eye on socials. Also, if anyone has an interest in gaining backstage experience, please email us - contact@forthchildrenstheatre.org.

We also have the opportunity for more adults to join our board of trustees, we are keen to hear from people who have a background in marketing and PR to help develop a new marketing plan for the company and ensure our productions are getting maximum reach to potential auditionees and audiences alike.

Thank you for all your support over 2025. This has been an incredible year for the company, and we cannot wait to see all of our brilliant young people tread the boards again in 2026!

Oggy! Oggy! Oggy! Oi! Oi! Oi! Ya beauty!

Lewis Baird is a Board Member and Creative Advisor at Forth Children’s Theatre