



Working with Paul Stebbings is a wonderful intercultural exchange between two mentalities: English and German. We have the same sense of humour, but the English way of creating theatre is more imaginative, more colourful, even more lively than I know from working with German directors and writers. As a German artist, my music develops from the search for the core of a characters and the contrasting British impulse allows us a fertile meeting ground for our music theatre creations.

copyright: Geoffrey Head

copyright Mark Dawson
copyright Dale Stone
I’m Thomas Johnson, I live in the Cotswolds in the UK. I am a composer, musician and theatre maker and have composed hundreds of scores for all sorts of different kinds of theatre: tiny studios, mid-scale theatres, in parks, in schools, on Broadway, on the beach, from Minnesota to St.Petersburg. I’ve been associated with TNT/ADG since 1993 and have written the music for 14 of their productions, including the perennial CHRISTMAS CAROL, OLIVER TWIST, HAMLET, KING LEAR, and most recently OTHELLO.
I greatly enjoy the collaborative process of theatre, and have a passion for working closely to text, believing that a musical underscore can be a proactive and exciting tool in shedding light on meaning; and music can of course be transcendent, travel beyond meaning, detonate a theatrical moment in a way that nothing else can.
I’m also passionate about choral music and have written quite a bit of it: an oratorio with a full orchestra sung in Gloucester Cathedral, and a song cycle performed by the Gloucester Cathedral bells and a children’s choir, are a couple of highlights. Human voices, singing in harmony, thrill like nothing else. There’s something incredibly moving about the sound, and the commonality of it.


"For me composing for music-theatre is like treading a line between film scoring and radio drama; helping to move the story forward while supporting the emotion of a given moment."