Winner of 2025/26 MTI STILES + DREWE MENTORSHIP AWARD announced
Mercury Musical Developments and Stiles + Drewe have announced the winner of the 2025-26 MTI Stiles + Drewe Mentorship Award: 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, 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.
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, and two funded one-day readings or R&Ds, and after 12 months, this 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!”.
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!"