Jack Montgomery
Phidippides
Jack is 21 years old and comes from Birmingham. His theatre credits include: Beauty & the Beast (Birmingham Hippodrome), Peter Pan and Brassed Off (Birmingham Rep). He appeared in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (London Palladium) and was in the original cast of both Mary Poppins (Prince Edward Theatre) and The Sound of Music (London Palladium). He also appeared in the title role in the Qdos production of Peter Pan at Wolverhampton’s Grande Theatre. His film credits include Ridley Scott’s Tristan & Isolde and The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey. TV credits include: Primeval (ITV), Doctors and Torchwood (Young Captain Jack) for the BBC. Recently, he has been touring Germany with The International Magic Tenors, an eight-part vocal group performing a crossover of classical, swing, pop and rock numbers.
Riana Athanasiou
Chorus
Riana trained at AMDA, New York. Theatre credits include: Fairy Godmother/Mother in Sleeping Beauty Awakes, Queen/Witch/Narrator in Immortal Water (Cyprus National Theatre, THOC). Opera credits include: Dido and Aeneas, Marcellina in Le Nozze Di Figaro, Zerlina in Don Giovanni (Cyprus Opera Organization). Musical theatre credits include: Nancy in Oliver! (Diastasis Productions), Mary in Mary Poppins, Belle in Beauty and the Beast and Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Morfi Productions). She has also appeared in several concerts in venues such as Herod Atticus Theatre, Lyrical Stage (Athens), The Kremlin Theatre (Moscow) and Palais de Congrès (Paris).
Lucyelle Cliffe
Chorus
Lucyelle trained at The London School of Musical Theatre. Theatre credits include: Hot Mikado (Landor Theatre), Sound of Music (Bahrain International Theatre), Thing About Men (Landor Thetare), Songs for a New World (Rose Theatre), Winter Wonderland (Hyde Park), Plague and Piramania (Edinburgh Festival & Upstairs at The Gatehouse), Once Upon A Time At The Adelphi (Union Theatre), Bacchus in Rehab (Etcetera Theatre), Crazy for You (London Palladium), Newsrevue (Canal Café Theatre), Rasputin Rocks! (Kenton Theatre), Sleeping Beauty (Oakengates Theatre), A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Comedy of Errors (British Touring Shakespeare Company), and Sleeping Beauty (Oakengates Theatre). Lucyelle is also a member of the West End Gospel choir.
Rahil Liapopoulou
Chorus
Rahil is a graduate of Veaki Drama School (Greece), Stella Adler Studio of Acting (N.Y.) and Birmingham School of Acting (UK). Before moving to England she was working for the National Theatre of Northern Greece. In England she performed in plays by O. Wilde, A. Radcliffe and G. Eliot among others. In 2012 her French novel adaptation The Devil in Love was staged at the Courtyard Theatre. She also works in film and was offered the part of Alexandra in the only Greek feature film with M. Scorsese as the Executive Producer, The Brides. Rahil has just returned from Athens where she performed a monologue-play based on the historical/religious figure Kassia (featured on National Television). She recently started a collaboration with Transmission Workshop where she teaches Greek Drama and open theatre performance for professional actors.
THE CREATIVE TEAM
William Lyons – Writer
William Lyons is a playwright who has spent much of his life as a student or teacher of philosophy in many countries. He is interested in ‘theatre of thought’ or drama that brings challenging ideas to the stage. His play Wittgenstein–The Crooked Roads won the START Chapbooks Award 2005 and was presented at Riverside Studios in London in 2011. Its companion piece, The Fir Tree and the Ivy, won the Eamon Keane Full Length Play Award in 2006 and has been translated into Italian as L’Edera e l’Abete.
Melina Theocharidou – Director
Melina Theocharidou is a multilingual director, actor and translator. She has a BA in French and Italian (First Class) from UCL and a MA in Text and Performance Studies from RADA and King’s College. Melina has a special interest in new plays and has directed the World Premieres of Elle A Live and Unplugged for the Shaw Theatre and The Hospital Club in London and Södra Teatern in Stockholm, Princess for the Camden Fringe Festival and STOFF in Stockholm, Enarxis for Satiriko Theatre in Cyprus, Dream for Theatre Underground at Brunel Museum and Red in the Forest at Poetry Cafe, Covent Garden. She has also directed the UK premiere of Pamela! The Musical for Lost Theatre One Act Festival. Melina was the Assistant Text Expert at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2010 and was commissioned as a literal translator by the Donmar Warehouse. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab 2012. As an actor she has worked in both text-based and devised physical theatre productions at The Hospital Club, The Shaw Theatre, The Yard Theatre, BAC, Lyric Hammersmith Studio and Forest Fringe amongst others. She also works in film and voice-overs. (www.melinatheo.com)
Katerina Angelopoupou – Designer
Katerina Angelopoulou studied Mathematics at Imperial College before training as a scenographer at Central Saint Martins. She was a finalist for the Linbury Prize in 2009, exhibited her work in the National Theatre and was a winner of the Royal Opera House Design Bursary in 2010. She has worked as an assistant for the National Theatre of Greece, the Schaubühne Berlin, and the Royal Opera House, and has designed for the Southbank Centre, the Camden Fringe, the STOFF in Stockholm, various short films, the last film of Theo Angelopoulos The Other Sea, and lately for choreographer Renato Zanella and the National Opera of Greece.
Karolina Spyrou – Lighting Designer
Karolina Spyrou was born in 1980 in Nicosia. She studied Theatre Design at Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and graduated in 2003 with First Class Honours. Since 2004 she has been working as a freelance lighting and set designer in Cyprus. From 2005 until 2008 she was an in-house lighting designer for THOC where she lit numerous productions. She has an ongoing collaboration with many theatre groups including ETHAL, Dionysos Theatre, Fresh Target Theatre and Solo for Three. She has worked on many projects as a lighting and set designer including dance, concerts and fashion shows. She has taken part in several festivals around the world including Edinburgh Fringe Festival as a lighting designer for the musical Blues in the Night, Euro-scene 14 Festival in Germany as a lighting designer for the dance performance Awakening and the Dance Union festival in London as a lighting designer for the dance performance Turnaround. She is currently doing a MA in Theatre Design with a pathway in Lighting Design at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
Olivios Karaolides – Composer/Orchestrator
Olivios Karaolides is a versatile composer and a musicologist. He has a Licence in Musique et Musicologie from the Sorbonne University and an MFA from the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Musical Theatre includes: Carlotta, A Telenovela Musical (New York, 2011) and Pamela! The Musical (London, 2012). His instrumental piece La Trahison won the Award of Excellence at the Global Music Awards and was presented at the 22nd Fringe Festival of Montreal, Canada and then at the music performance Enarxis (Nicosia, 2012). He also won first prize at the 20th Cyprus Folk Composition