Andy McGregor

Took a wee break from Elf-based business today to record my song 'Side by Side' live. Actual song with band is here:    

It's all been so busy recently that I haven't had a proper chance to post anything on here. I've just finished working on a couple of great projects. I was back as assistant director with the National Theatre of Scotland's 'In Time O' Strife'. That took me all sorts of interesting places around the country (including a short performance in the parliament at Holyrood, which was just brilliant) and it was fantastic to see the show grow and for it to engage a really wide-spread audience. The cast of 'In Time O' Strife'. Photo by Andy Ross I have just finished this year's Shakespeare in Schools project with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. This is now the fifth year that I've taken second year BA actors out to schools for workshops and a reduced version of a play, this year it was the turn of 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. I love this project as it takes me and the RCS students to places we would rarely visit, this time a

Working on a Scottish classic Image by David McGarvey My most recent project is a very interesting one, I am co-directing (alongside Prof Maggie Kinloch) the John McGrath classic 'The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil' for the Largs Players community drama group, also featuring the mod-winning Largs Gaelic choir (you can see photos from our production here ). The play was first performed by 7:84 (pictured below) who toured it all around Scotland and, in doing so, created a classic piece of Scottish theatre. It is an interesting experience to work on this play for a number of reasons. The most obvious being the text itself, it's unlike any play that I've ever come across and I doubt will come across again. Here's a little snippet of the opening number. The Play The play was first performed 40 years ago, in 1974. It tells the story of the Scottish Highlands from 1746 up until - the then - modern day. It looks at how the people and their la

I have spent the last few weeks working on a show called 'Notes to Self' with the 2nd year Musical Theatre students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The brief is simple in principle, create a show where the students generate all the material themselves. In practice this kind of work has a number of significant challenges but l have a lot of experience working on projects with multiple writers and, sometimes, hundreds of participants. I thought it may be helpful for anyone else who is looking to devise with large groups if I documented how we did it, the techniques used to create ideas and how modern technology can really make life easier. We are transported back into the 1950's. Photo by Kevin Robertson Generating Ideas We started in traditional devised theatre territory. I asked everyone to bring in a photo and a object, these were then left together in a little pile. Another actor would look at these objects, some which made sense (e.g. a picture of a sn

I spent the last week working on a play that I first wrote, with Samuel Keefe and Molly Vevers, almost 2 years ago.  'Love 2.0' is a really fun little show that I think is going to really make people chuckle. You can read all about the show on my theatre company's blog here  and you can see a little trailer I made up above. We had photographer Emily Rowan in rehearsal ( her website is here ) and she caught various great shots of the actors but also, unusually, of my good self at work.  I'm not sure what the picture below says about my directing 'technique'... Hopefully this is a show that we will be able to tour later in the year, but we shall see how our little showing at the Tron comes along first, it's certainly been a really fun show to make.

Weeeell the end of 2013 was extremely busy for me (hence lack of being on here) with various projects happening. First off I composed the music for 'Bauble Trouble' at the Citizens theatre (directed by Guy Hollands). This was a great wee show for nursery children and we received fantastic reviews  for it.  It was a real challenge writing so much music - the entire show was pretty much underscored - in such a short time, but I loved it.  I had my own little station in the corner (see below) and, using Logic Pro X and Native Instruments Komplete Ultimate amongst others, I created a soundtrack that I was pretty pleased with. My portable studio set-up Here is the track that opened the show:   After Bauble Trouble was up and running I moved back to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where I was assistant-director on their production of Merchant of Venice that has just opened this week.  It is a production which shall be going to Taiwan, here's a short trailer that