Mercury Musical Developments and Stiles + Drewe are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025-26 MTI Stiles + Drewe Mentorship Award is Sam Norman and Eliza Randall with their new musical Echolocation.
The MTI Stiles + Drewe Mentorship Award was launched in 2016 by the multi award-winning musical theatre writing partnership George Stiles and Anthony Drewe (Honk!, Mary Poppins, Betty Blue Eyes, Half A Sixpence, Identical) and Mercury Musical Developments. Generously supported by Musical Theatre International (Europe), the Mentorship Award is presented biennially to a writer or writing team who have submitted the first full draft of a new musical. Stiles + Drewe, along with a panel of judges, select the winning project – the writers of which then benefit from bespoke mentorship and support over a 12-month period.
The selection process has been lengthy, with three writing teams shortlisted for the award. The shortlisted applicants were Sarah Middleton, Eleanor Isherwood and Hannah Stone for VAMP and Micha Mirto and Jordan Paul Clarke for Raising Gays.
Echolocation is a musical performed in pitch blackness. A teenage love story without a map. A road trip musical in the dark. 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.
Echolocation is being produced by Maryann Wright for Maryann Wright Productions, in collaboration with director Niloo-Far Khan and disability consultant Alie B. Gorrie. The show is currently in development thanks to a grant from Arts Council England. It has also been supported at NYU Tisch, the Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project, Manhattan School of Music, and the BMI Bookwriting Workshop.
As the recipient of the MTI Stiles + Drewe Mentorship Award, Norman and Randall will receive;
A fully funded, one-week development residential retreat in France to work on the musical.
Two funded one-day readings or R&Ds
After 12 months, the above culminates in rehearsal provision for a workshop followed by a full industry showcase presentation with a professional cast, director and musical director.
George Stiles and Anthony Drewe said “We have been really impressed once again by the breadth and range of entries for this year’s Mentorship Award and our final shortlist were all very strong contenders. However, we’re thrilled to be mentoring Echolocation, a story that presents a truly original experience to its audience, as they will perceive the show purely from an auditory perspective, exactly as one of the two lead characters experiences her entire life. Sam & Eliza’s show is funny, tuneful, truthful, contemporary and truly original. We’d have been batty to pass up the chance to help it develop over the next year!”.
Natalia Scorer, Executive Director of Mercury Musical Developments said “We are looking forward to supporting this ground-breaking new musical over the coming year. Sam and Eliza are very talented writers who I know will make the most of the opportunity. Thank you to Music Theatre International for their ongoing support of the scheme and to George and Anthony for generously giving their time and expertise to help new writing.”
Sam Norman and Eliza Randall said “As theatre kids who grew up on Betty Blue Eyes and The Wind in the Willows, we’re overjoyed, grateful and a little bit in shock to have been selected for the Stiles & Drewe Mentorship Award 2025! What a gift to learn from such an incredible team about the craft of writing musicals and the mechanics of putting them on. Massive thanks to George and Ants, to the legends at Mercury Musical Developments, to our producer Maryann, director Niloo and disability consultant Alie B., and to whatever glitch in the matrix made this possible!”
Sam Norman is an award-winning librettist and lyricist working on both sides of the pond. His work has been called “remarkable… genius writing” (StagetoPage), “delightfully funny” (Buzzfeed), “witty, hilarious and completely delightful” (The Huffington Post), and “crushingly cheese, but satisfying” (The Times, a personal highlight). Recent projects include Come Dine With Me: The Musical (UK tour) and Hairpiece (Kennedy Center). He is a Resident Artist at the American Lyric Theater and member of the Experiments in Opera Writers’ Room 4.0, as well as a three-time finalist for the Stiles & Drewe Best New Song Prize, winner of the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, and Broadway Future Songbook writer.
Eliza Randall is a composer, pianist, and music director originally hailing from Boulder City, Nevada. Her work includes Black Holes Like Donuts (Symphony Space, Prospect Musicals Lab) and The Yellow Wallpaper (Alleyway Theatre, finalist for Mazumdar Short Play Prize). A Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriter and two-time finalist for the Stiles & Drewe Best New Song Prize, she has had various compositions performed off-West End and off-Broadway at venues including Lincoln Center, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, The Other Palace and Hackney Empire.
Previous winners of the MTI Stiles + Drewe Mentorship Prize include Maz O’Connor for The Wife of Michael Cleary, Omar Baroud for After Elijah, Jim Barne & Kit Buchan for The Season, Ben Glasstone for Reanimator: A Zombie Musical, and Darren Clark & Rhys Jennings for The Wicker Husband. The Season now called Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) opened in the West End in 2024 and is currently running an extended season at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston. The Wicker Husband had its first professional production in 2022 at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury while Ben Glasstone’s Reanimator is currently being developed as a film.