Name: Cinema Paradiso
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore

Musical theatre has often let a score live first as a record, and only later asked whether it can hold a room. AYLA: A New Musical has taken that road with unusual patience. Giovanna Romagnoli, a producer of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, and the composer Gianluca Cucchiara have spent several years building it through workshops, readings, concerts and recordings. Its next step is a single semi-staged concert in London, with Nathania Ong in the title role and a four-piece band behind her.

The premise is a fable with very little padding. In a future where a dying natural world has split communities through fear and the struggle to survive, a young woman must choose between accepting the world she has inherited and finding the courage to change it. The production’s tagline puts it more tightly: when the world lost its fire, she found her own.

Glass frontage of the St James Theatre on Palace Street in London, now The Other Palace — The Palace Street frontage of the venue now known as The Other Palace, photographed in 2015 under its former St James Theatre name. Photo: Alan Myers via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

The cast reads like a roll call of recent West End leads. Ong, who played Éponine in Les Misérables and Eliza in Hamilton, is Ayla. Djavan van de Fliert, Kristoff in Frozen, plays Mohr. The singer-songwriter Arlissa, whose “Hearts Ain’t Gonna Lie” has passed 100 million Spotify streams, is Sindah. Astrid Harris, currently Céline Dion in Titaníque at the Criterion Theatre, is Tonah. Glenn Adamson, Strat in Bat Out of Hell, is Rooh, and Jonathan Andrew Hume, Simba in The Lion King, is Crohm. Further casting is still to be announced.

The writing team is split along classic lines: lyrics by Andrew James Whelan, book by Clive Frayne, dramaturgy by Michael Conley, and an original concept by Tony Cucchiara. Direction falls to Eleesha Drennan, a choreographer whose credits include supervising the choreography of ABBA Voyage. For a semi-staged evening that is a telling choice, because when there is little scenery, movement has to carry the architecture of each scene.

The venue fits the experiment. The Other Palace, on Palace Street, describes itself as a house for discovering and developing new theatre, with lunchtime readings, a podcast about making musicals and a development grant. The building’s history, as the venue tells it, runs from the Charlotte Chapel of 1766 to the Westminster Theatre of 1931, and Bill Kenwright Ltd acquired it in 2021. Heathers began its UK life there before moving to the West End.

The concert takes place on 30 November 2026 in the Main House and runs 1 hour 50 minutes, including an interval, with tickets from £25. The production warns of themes of conflict, war, death and loss, along with loud music, flashing lights, haze and smoke. It follows the concept album, released in June and recorded in London with Ong, van de Fliert and Arlissa among the voices, and an earlier staged concert at Sadler’s Wells’ Lilian Baylis Studio.

One night is a short run for a show years in the making. For a score that has so far lived mostly in headphones, it is also the first real test of whether the story survives the move to a stage.

Tags: The Other Palace, AYLA: A New Musical, Cinema Paradiso, Eleesha Drennan, Gianluca Cucchiara, Giovanna Romagnoli