Echolocation
Book and Lyrics by Sam Norman, Music by Eliza Randall
Winner of the 2025 MTI Stiles & Drewe Mentorship Award
A road trip musical in the dark. A teenage love story without a map. Echolocation is a musical performed in pitch blackness.
Teenage best friends Ethan and Sadie are polar opposites – he’s a street-smart athlete who grew up inches above the poverty line, she’s a blind intellectual who’s sick of her overprotective family. When a DNA test reveals that Ethan’s long-lost father is alive, it’s a chance for him to chase the family he’s never met and for her to escape the parents who never let her go. And so the secret road trip begins.
Blending score and soundscape, the feeling of mist and the smell of wet grass, Echolocation is a story you hear and feel but never see.
The musical is currently in development with Maryann Wright Productions, in collaboration with director Niloo-Far Khan and disability consultant Alie B. Gorrie.
Echolocation won the 2025 MTI Stiles & Drewe Mentorship Award, a prize given every two years to a new musical. It has also received a £20,000 grant from Arts Council England.
What’s an audio-only musical? How can they be creatively exciting and widely accessible? Some thoughts here.