The Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre will be the venue for a brief run of a new musical, The Dreaming.

Written by Howard Goodall and Charles Hart, The Dreaming is based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and is set in an English country house on the eve of the First World War.

The Linbury Studio Theatre is often used for musicals as well as dance pieces and opera: it has been a much-used and useful venue for musicals in the annual Covent Garden Festival of musical theatre.

New musicals like The Dreaming sorely need performance spaces for brief runs to see how a show plays to a live audience of the general public: for the Royal Opera House to let the Linbury be used in this way is an ideal way of meeting its need to be seen as a flexible and approachable local performance space as well as a home of opera and ballet - one of the remits of the organization when the vast sums of money necessary to fund the ROH's massive redevelopment of its some were made available by the government.

The Dreaming, being itself a musical based on a play and performed in an opera house is an ideal example of the way that theatrical art forms can influence and work alongside each other.

—by Theatrenow