Tom Self on panto, performance, and the piano

Me, Tom Self, and I: the sell-out show by composer, musical director, and performer Tom Self in the heart of the West End. Marking his cabaret debut, the gig was hailed by theatre critic Jonathan Baz as “polished, witty and wonderfully performed”. It was an evening filled with Tom’s original writing. Numbers from pantomimes and plays, online lockdown music, and songs composed for the show took centre stage at the Crazy Coqs. “I’ve written bits of music on and off for a while,” says Tom. “I did a lot when I was younger and then took a break. Over the last couple of years, I’ve written more and more – for shows, pantomimes, online. I’ve found so much joy in writing, so I just made a decision to push that further. I thought, ‘how do I put myself out there as Tom the composer, as well as Tom the actor and musical director?’. And I got to work. Me, Tom Self, and I is rooted in my love for theatre and experience on the stage across the last ten years.”

Tom sang and performed on the piano, joined by a live band and West End guests, most recently Kate Ramshaw, Anna-Jane Casey, and Lewis Asquith. A trio of Trinity Laban Musical Theatre students Grace Clifford, Romy Coates-Massey, and Nadia Harper / Sasha Carroll, Jasmine Cole, and Hannah Jarvis also took to the stage to sing with Tom. “The performance was almost consistently breaking the fourth wall, which was terrifying but really, really fun,” he says. “I was very calm when I put the tickets on sale at first, but about two weeks before, anxiety kicked in and I thought, ‘hold on. This is an evening of material that no one knows, no one is going to be able to sing to, and it’s essentially me selling that from a piano. What on earth have I done?’

“Brasserie Zedel’s Crazy Coqs is an intimate venue, so holds about 80 people. And I suddenly thought; on-stage in front of 500 strangers that you can’t see is one thing, a room with 80 people that are friends and family that you can see is also terrifying. How am I going to cope with this? But on the day itself, right after I’d sung the first number, I found it so relaxing and amazing to be able to acknowledge all these people in the room. Because the show was so meta and self-reflexive, there was no point where I felt I had to give a performance as a specific character – it was really lovely just to be able to be me and talk directly to the audience.”

Tom first encountered the Crazy Coqs stage while he was studying at Trinity Laban. “When I was a student here, I got the opportunity to be a dresser for a now friend of mine who was doing a show at the Crazy Coqs,” he explains. “I approached Vicki Stretton (Head of Musical Theatre) about it and said that this opportunity might also lead to other things – could I go and do it? It’s quite unusual to get the chance to work as a dresser when you specialise in performance, but Vicki said that it was great – I should learn from this artist and be a part of their show. So for the last ten years, the Crazy Coqs has been a recurring element in my life, and I’ve done a few different projects there.

“It then seemed like the most natural place to put on this solo show showcasing my writing. At the end of last year, I decided to approach them and perform for an evening there, featuring original songs and getting other people in to sing as well as myself. I wanted to invite friends, family, colleagues, and show them what I can do. Very gratefully, I did two shows at the start of the year which sold out really quickly and the venue got me back to do a third one in July. It was a broad collection of different song styles all thrown into a lovely evening at the Crazy Coqs!”.

Where did this love for theatre start? Tom recalls his aunt taking him to see local shows at the Oxford Theatre during his childhood, with two productions standing out: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Copacabana. “I absolutely loved it. Copacabana isn’t the most profound piece in the world, but it’s so fun and show biz and I thought ‘that’s what I need to do, that’s just fun!’” he says. Noticing his love for theatre, his parents sent him to Stagecoach when he was twelve. This was his first introduction to performing and he loved every second. “I was at Stagecoach for about five or six years, and it was so cool. There wasn’t a lot of theatre in my school or education, so it was amazing to be surrounded by people who were consistently acting, singing, and dancing. My love and experience in theatre grew rapidly from this point onwards. I saw more shows and started singing lessons.”

When it came to applying for his undergraduate degree, musical theatre was an obvious choice for Tom. After taking a gap year, he auditioned and accepted a place at Trinity Laban. Talking about the audition process, Tom says, “I just found that Trinity Laban was so lovely and homely and had such great energy. Greenwich is a wonderful place – I’m from Oxford, so it’s not the smallest place in the world – but coming to London at 19, you go ‘Wow, this is a big change!’. Greenwich was like its own mini-Oxford in a way, and it felt a lot less scary. Trinity Laban has a really lovely, thorough audition process. We did everything. I felt like the staff were very invested in me as a person, they tested us in all the different disciplines, but equally asked us what we wanted to do and what styles of dance we liked. I remember doing a tap solo for my audition dance – there’d never been tap at any other college as far as the auditions go and I thought that was really cool.”

Several years later, Tom now teaches students the very degree he studied. “I love teaching at Trinity Laban,” he says. “It’s so fulfilling to come back and teach at the place you trained. All the students I’ve taught here over the last few years have been so positive and hungry to learn. I equally think there’s a really nice element to my relationship with them – they know I’ve been through the same experience, so it opens a conversation about how we tailor things in the lessons to what I had or what works for the industry. I love it, it’s such a nice thing to do.”

Alongside teaching at Trinity Laban, Tom runs choral workshops for the Watermill Theatre and the Hazlitt Theatre in Maidstone, while teaching for the West End Musical Choir in London. “I’ve played piano for a long time. During my undergraduate studies, I had access to practice rooms with amazing pianos and was able to accompany people in auditions. Over the years, I’ve taught myself to read and learn more of the music theory that I was introduced to as a child,” he says. “Leading a choir and teaching very specific things petrified me when I first did it for a former boss in Oxford. But I’ve done more and more arranging, and you just learn on the job. I’ve also been able to progress my learning through the teaching of it, so that’s been really fun. I love teaching a choir now, it’s one of the most joyful things I can do in a week.

“A particular highlight for me was Trinity Laban’s Show Choir project, where the foundation and first year musical theatre students sung together. They do a performance early in the year and the last one we did had about 80 singers. It was such a magnificent sound. You don’t often get to stand in a room with 80 people singing music and certainly not music that you’ve arranged which you can hear back. It was such a rewarding experience.”

Tom has written for or musically arranged over twenty pantomimes and is Musical Director for Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, currently composing for their 2024 production of Cinderella. He was a Finalist for ‘Contribution to Music’ at the 2024 Great British Pantomime Awards, having been nominated for his work at the theatre. As a composer, Tom’s credits include Brief Encounter (UK Tour), Aladdin, Dick Whittington & Sleeping Beauty  which won the 2023 Offie Award for Best Pantomime. Ideas for a song come to him as a theme or a hook, often on the tube, in the shower, on a walk. He has a vast collection of voice notes on his phone that he then uses to bring the melodies to life. “The amazing thing about panto is that you’ve got this fantastic element of the live audience that changes daily with every show”, he says. “You’ll have a schools’ audience one morning, a different crowd in the evening – you tailor things in a certain way, while keeping the songs and script the same. Panto audiences are so good at responding live to different elements, so you’re always going to get a slightly different show. We do that in theatre as well, but it’s more prominent in panto. Understudies and covers bring a dynamic where you’ll do a distinct show each time. I did a play last year on tour – Brief Encounter – where every venue had different circumstances which made each show very memorable. We had to tweak the performances to make it specific to the venue every week: a nice and variable thing to keep it fresh.”

From the productions Tom has been involved in, is there a character he would choose to bring into the real world, beyond the stage? “I think it would be Delores Van Cartier from Sister Act, because I think she’s such a magnificent, fun, and energetic character,” he responds. “A lot of what Dolores brings revolves around music – her love and passion for the art form. Her work with the choir brings that to light. I think there are a lot of parallels between her role and what I’ve been doing. I think she’d be a magnificent person to learn from and have a good night out with. Because she’s wild!”.