Gareth Malone Goes to Glyndebourne (2010)

For their latest community production where professionals perform alongside amateurs, the artistic team at Glyndebourne - a world renowned opera house in East Sussex - commission choirmaster Gareth Malone to recruit fifty non-professional teen-aged performers to be the opera's chorus. By opening night, the amateur chorus needs to be as professional as the professional performers. Gareth's most difficult challenge is to get teenagers over the fact that the production is an opera, a type of show which most are not only not accustomed to, but probably believe they don't like without ever even having been exposed to it. When Gareth learns that the production will be "Knight Crew", a yet uncompleted opera which will be a modern urban retelling of the King Arthur story, he believes he has a bigger problem in needing to recruit some teens who have been exposed to the gang lifestyle to provide a sense of realism. As Gareth goes through the six month recruitment and training process, he comes across some known challenges and some unexpected challenges, some which relate to himself as a neophyte chorus master of an opera.