PAMELA RUDGE

Voice Tutor

Pamela Rudge trained at the Royal College of Music and worked at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School for over twenty years, becoming Head of Music and Singing for the last twelve years. She combined this role with a busy singing life. Pamela is a classical mezzo soprano and has a wide repertoire singing opera, light opera, oratorio, recitals and concert work in the UK and abroad. She sings as a soloist with UK orchestras in works such as Elgar’s “Sea Pictures” and is equally at home on the operatic stage playing roles from Mrs Herring in Britten’s “Albert Herring” to Suzuki in Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly”. She created the role of Madame Coulette (a formidable pipe-smoking granny) in the world premiere of Eric Wetherell’s “A Foreign Field”, for which she achieved much critical acclaim.

In the course of her work at BOVTS she has had much success training actors in singing, helping them to develop and strengthen their singing technique, and giving them confidence in their singing voices and in acting through song. Her students were very successful in the prestigious Stephen Sondheim Student Performer of the Year Competition, with two winners, 3 runners-up and twelve finalists in eight years.

Pamela runs vocal workshops and singing courses for theatre companies and singing groups in the UK, Switzerland, Cyprus and Glasgow. Pamela has been Musical Director on many musical theatre shows, most notably “London Road” for BOVTS at BOV, nominated for ‘Best Theatre Production in the South West’, and the world premiere of “Mrs Beeton Says”, a new musical by Eamonn O’Dwyer and Helen Watts, commissioned by BOVTS and now published by Samuel French. Last summer she was MD for two shows – “Catastrophe Bay”, another new musical at BOV, and “Calendar Girls” in Cornwall.