Jo: The Little Women Musical – inside the cast recording

January 2025, and we’re at London’s Abbey Road Studios; I’ve passed the blue plaque proudly displaying the name Edward Elgar and entered the studio with the famous Beatles Challen upright piano sat in the corner.

Recorded over two weeks, Jo: The Little Women Musical has come to life with its first studio cast album. Joining a 29-piece orchestra and 16-strong choir were a host of international theatre stars, including Christine Allado (in the title role of Jo March), Julian Ovenden and Laura Benanti (who won a Tony for Gypsy on Broadway, and embraced a different kind of drama playing Melania Trump on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert). 5-time Grammy nominee Nigel Wright is at the sound desk, this the latest line in a CV that includes Barbra Streisand, Take That and most of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s cast recordings for the last 35 years. All the while, a camera crew circulated throughout the days, building on an already-impressive online presence.

Following its album release on the Grammy-winning label Center Stage Records this spring, expect a semi-staged concert premiere in the West End in 2026. It’s a major positive headline for new musicals, showing big budget treatment still exists and new projects can get off the ground.

Old-school romantic writing, too. One cast member told me it ‘feels and sounds like the musicals you grew up listening to; it has the romance and nostalgia of an old movie musical. But on the flip side, delving into each woman in detail, it has a contemporary edge.’

Taking place over a decade, the story follows the March sisters and their journey into adulthood. Jo March hopes to become a famous writer. It’s in facing the loss of her sibling that she finds a creative catalyst, deciding to write the story of her sisters.

It may have been published in 1868/69, but Little Women continues to speak to modern audiences; it has been adapted for the big screen a whopping seven times, most recently in 2019 by Barbie legend Greta Gerwig (a movie that received six Oscar nominations, don’t you know, including Best Picture).

Among those adapting the story for the stage is Dan Redfeld, the composer and studio album co-producer, with Christina Harding and John Gabriel Koladziej as lyricist-librettists. Proving that theatre is a labour of love, this trio began work on the show nearly three decades ago; it reached workshop stage in New York in the late ’90s but was shelved following the 9/11 attacks.

For Redfeld, then, it’s a chance to return to some of the sounds of the pre-millennium. ‘We don’t hear the big pseudo-operatic shows anymore’, he tells me, in a break between sessions. We’re sat in a lounge upstairs with a gallery view of Studio Three. ‘Everything has moved into the pop idiom. In some ways, this is a similar position to what Les Mis and Phantom faced in the ’80s, offering a lush romantic tone when shows had started to move into a more pop-oriented world. People want melodies and I love the colours of an orchestra. As John Williams says, the orchestra hasn’t changed much in three hundred years and that’s because it works; electronics might date after a period, but not the real, acoustic sounds of an orchestra.’

 Listening to the sessions at Abbey Road, I revel in the long-lined melodies and lush string sound. It taps into Redfeld’s own classical background, having studied composition and conducting at Boston’s New England Conservatory and at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles); thanks to a partnership the latter enjoyed with the LA Philharmonic, Redfeld regularly observed orchestral rehearsals led by the likes of Simon Rattle and Zubin Mehta. Classical music has permeated his work ever since; as concert composer, he’s penned a solo impromptu for harp, composed for the Santa Barbra Symphony and created a song cycle for soprano and chamber orchestra. The ‘pseudo-operatic quality’ Redfeld identifies in the Little Women novel makes it a natural fit for a similarly classical-leaning score. 

‘I reference a lot of Copland, Bernstein, James Horner and John Williams, making this an homage to great American orchestral composers. One of the key aspects is the use of leitmotifs, recurring musical fragments tied to characters or settings like in a film score or an opera; leitmotifs are in all the shows I admire most, shows like West Side Story and Sweeney Todd. This integration is something that I feel is lacking in contemporary shows; these days it can often feel like a song simply follows another song. While there might be a reprise, nothing is as integrated as it used to be. But I grew up on West Side Story; you start hearing ‘Somewhere’ early in the show, so that it truly lands when we reach the song proper. Puccini is a master of this too, suggesting tunes repeatedly in the orchestra until somebody sings the actual aria much later.’ 

No surprise, then, to discover that Redfeld was mentored by the great Irwin Kostal, the Oscar-winning co-orchestrator of West Side Story on stage and on film – who happened to live on the same road as Redfeld’s college girlfriend! Kostal became a mentor in the final year of his life, the pair collaborating on many an orchestration. ‘He was always telling me’, Redfeld reminisces, ‘to keep things colourful and keep things changing. A constant colour. An instrument can seamlessly pick up a line from another, and the music will play better when it’s not too complex. Simplicity is key.’

The London session players certainly made things look easy, sight-reading their scores and proving ‘so intuitive’. Redfeld suggests that part of this is also the intimacy of the Abbey Road space; where LA demo recordings took place in a huge Warner Bros studio, the smaller space in London means Redfeld doesn’t need to conduct with as broad a beat. Smaller gestures and physical proximity help strengthen a sense of ensemble. Especially vital for a piece about a family…

Appropriately for a coming-of-age story, singer Sophie Pollono (who plays Amy March) has herself grown up alongside this project. She first met Redfeld when he was Music Director for her LA high school production of Sweeney Todd; she was fifteen, and across the following five years has become a key voice on demos and at investor auditions, helping bring the show to this point.

Poignantly, her character’s progression closely follows her own, Amy ending the show at Sophie’s current age of twenty. ‘What I relate to most’, Pollono tells me, ‘is that Amy wants it all. Jo is a little more realistic, wanting to be a great writer and willing to sacrifice other parts of her life. But Amy wants everything, determined to be a great painter but still have a love of her life, a family, wear wonderful clothes and travel the world. Indeed, Amy doesn’t come into her own until she’s able to leave the house and be away from family. As someone who studies MT at college now, there’s a whole new roundedness in myself that I’ve found in being on my own, and through that a whole new appreciation of my family. Amy’s story feels a little like mine!’

Redfeld’s score helps track that progression, with a more pop-like sensibility to her first act songs suggesting the child that she is; here, Pollono tries ‘to have a bright youthful tone to my voice, with some big belt moments.’ But then, as she develops into a young woman come the second act, the writing embraces ‘more of a legit soprano’.

We ponder what the Abbey Road space brings to a score like this. ‘In Little Women, America is still a new place and new idea. Abbey Road as a studio has allowed so many new voices and new sounds to be heard, while retaining a classic ideal. I feel we’re trying to do something similar; while we’re telling a classic story, you can feel it in the energy of this place to be bold and try new things.’

For Pollono, a new thing this certainly is. Not only is it her first time at Abbey Road (and only her second trip to London), it’s also her first commercially released recording and her first experience of singing with an orchestra this big.

 ‘When you sing accompanied by piano’, she explains, ‘you are the leader; but when singing with an orchestra, you have to become one with them. You try to add to this ensemble, as opposed to just worrying about your own part. I grew up in choirs and that education of working with an ensemble has proven so important here: it’s a show about the four sisters, after all.’

It’s a massive contrast to the Celine Dion-inspired Titanique, which Rob Houchen is soon to dash off to perform in (his run continues to June). ‘This show’, he beams, ‘has a real feel of the classic scores – Phantom and Les Mis vibes – but with a modern tone. I play a young man who’s filled with the energy of youth, and the songs reflect that.’

 Houchen plays Laurie Laurence, and is excited to be reunited with Julian Ovenden following their spell in Daniel Evans’ Chichester Festival Theatre production of South Pacific. Houchen suggests there are parallels in the sound of those two shows, but points to The Light in the Piazza – which he presented at LA Opera in 2019 – as another apt comparison.

‘There’s a sweeping orchestral sound and romance to both shows, some beautiful melodies and soaring strings. In LA, I sang with a 35-piece orchestra every night, and most of all that taught me to trust my ear. I’m not the best notation reader but if it’s written well, it makes total sense instinctively; you can hear and feel it, rather than read it.’

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Although no stranger to orchestras, Houchen admits ‘you must resist the element of grandeur to them. You can get swept away by a soaring orchestra and decide you’re going to sing every line to its full count and try to sound powerful constantly; but when I listen to a cast album, I want to hear people acting through song. The story must still be told. You must remember the acting is just as important.’

Houchen had seen social media clips of Jo: The Little Women Musical long before they’d approached him for the recording in late 2024; its visible online presence is proof of just how switched on and serious its producers are – and Houchen is well aware of how unusual a privilege this Abbey Road setting is.

‘There are a lot of start-up musicals and grassroots projects that don’t have the funding; as a creator myself, I find it hard to find the financial help to get things off the ground. But for this show, Abbey Road is a well-deserved gift to a story that genuinely needs a strong and large-scale setting like this.’

Sat in Studio Three of Abbey Road, I think of the countless artists who have walked these floors: in this room alone, everyone from Lady Gaga to Amy Winehouse, Dua Lipa to Bruno Mars. The latest inhabitant of this hallowed studio has taken nearly thirty years to get here, but with an album now released and a concert version fast approaching, 2025 may very well prove its year.

Little Women might be a coming-of-age story, but there’s a real sense this show, too, is finally finding its feet.

The Jo: The Little Women Musical studio album is out now (23 May 2025)

This feature was originally comissioned for the April 2025 issue of Musicals