HEARTBEAT THE MUSICAL

Heartbeat was a pop-rock musical aiming to challenge the stigmas and shatter the taboos around mental health, as a response to the increasing reported cases of mental illnesses in 16-25-year-olds, and in the alarming number of male suicides that it causes.

Heartbeat has since been redeveloped by writer Ryan Mellish into Supernovas for Super Loners. We cannot wait to see what Ryan does with Supernovas and we have every confidence in the long future of this production.

2021 update:

Enjoy a selection of four songs from Supernovas for Super Loners, filmed at the Bread & Roses Theatre as part of Viable in 2021 – Watch Now.

If you’re struggling to cope, please reach out to organisations such as The Samaritans (116 123)
or Mind (0300 123 3393).

You won’t be a burden, you shouldn’t be embarrassed, and they will understand.

HEARTBEAT 2017

Heartbeat was a pop-rock musical aiming to challenge the stigmas and shatter the taboos around mental health.

Ryan Mellish approached us early in 2017, and asked us to produce a musical centring young people’s mental health. When has this been done before? We had to produce this innovative piece of work.

Heartbeat first premiered in the 2017 at Bath Fringe Festival and was praised for the ‘open and frank manner‘ in which it explored mental health and suicide.

Audiences ‘felt things [they] never knew existed, as they touted the show as ‘what theatre should be’, and ‘the reason arts need to be funded’.

2017 CAST

2017 CAST

2021 UPDATE

“I’m sure you’re tired of hearing and reading statistics about how more and more people are struggling with their mental health. Tired that it keeps getting worse, tired that nothing’s being done, tired that women are so often neglected from the conversation because men are systemically conditioned to never share a feeling. It all sucks. Something has to give, at some point, right? And when it does, what will happen? What will we lose, and what will we build in its place?

And until that moment, how do we cope with the losses we suffer every day? The little bits of ourselves that get ground down by employers, landlords, barely making ends meet, knowing you’ll never be able to afford a house but knowing that also it doesn’t really matter since a bunch of pig-headed corporations are going to let the world burn to death in the next few decades anyway?

Supernovas for Super Loners is never going solve any of those problems. A musical can’t save the world. But writing it has kept bits of me alive that would’ve otherwise been lost, and reminded me of the connections and the places and people I call home that can somehow make it all feel worth it. And I hope, if it can do that for me, then maybe it can do the same for you.

– RYAN MELLISH.

Visit Ryan’s Website for more information about Supernovas for Super Loners.