James Lark’s musical theatre writing includes book, lyrics and music for Infants (OSO Arts Centre and Quarry Theatre, July 2022), Miracles at Short Notice (MusicalTalk‘s pick of the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe) and the award-winning 2007 total Fringe sell-out Tony Blair the Musical (“runs the melodic gamut from near-Weillian severity to knowingly schmaltzy balladry, and is packed with rich, tight harmonies” – The Daily Telegraph). He wrote and directed the music for Io Theatre Company’s actor-musician adaptations Dickens’ Ghosts, A Christmas Carol and The Snow Spider, their realisation of J. M. Barrie’s A Well Remembered Voice, and their forthcoming production The Confessions of Fanny Cradock. Other theatre music includes The Snow Queen and Peter Pan: the Revenge of Captain Hook for Rolling Stock Theatre Company, Theophilus Scatterdust’s Magical Gift and The Borrowers for Dreamshed Theatre, Lysistrata at the Watford Palace Theatre, NewsRevue and a setting of new words by Andrew Motion for Bush Theatre’s Sixty-Six Books at Westminster Abbey. Short film scores include Death Sentence, The Ghost of Kirkton Fell, A Hand in the Bush and Savage Mountain.

He has had music commissioned for the choir of Westminster Abbey, Graham Johnson with The Songmakers’ Almanac at the Wigmore Hall, Guy Bovet, James Bowman, the Bromley Boy Singers and he collaborated on the song cycle Voices of London for Song in the City. His work has been performed by English Voices, Vivamus and the choirs of St Paul’s Cathedral and Trinity College Cambridge, with recordings by the choirs of Girton and Selwyn and the chapel choir of Bedford school. He was composer-in-residence at Bedford School and is Director of Music at Westminster Abbey Choir School.