Over the past 20 years Danny McAvoy has written a number of completely new and original musicals based around challenging moments in history when, against often overwhelming odds, people had to choose to stand up for what is right.

When Covid struck and closed down live theatre, Danny decided to make serialised radio productions of two of his musicals, Little Ships, about a mixed English and French family in 1940, and Uprising!, about the 1549 peasants uprising in Norfolk. Each of these musicals explored the moral and practical dilemmas each person faced when confronted by radical change. Danny hired a super group of professional actor/singers and worked with them online to create five-episode radio productions for each musical. These productions were broadcast during 2020/21 by radio stations in the UK and elsewhere to, so the radio stations told us, a total of around 200,000 listeners for each episode. Little Ships was later staged at the Barnfield Theatre in Exeter.

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In 2022, moved by his own brother’s story of addiction, poor mental health and rough sleeping, Danny set out to better understand the causes and consequences of homelessness and rough sleeping and to explore harm, exclusion and recovery in the modern world. Out of his research came his musical Eddie & Jenny, from which he first created another radio production that was broadcast leading up to Christmas 2022.

Eddie & Jenny is a love story that uses storytelling to not only to entertain but to educate audiences, challenge harmful attitudes, and promote understanding of the consequences of poverty, trauma, and social breakdown. The June 2025 pilot performances at The Phoenix Theatre Exeter reached full public audiences and generated strong evidence of attitude change and increased awareness and empathy. We are now building a new, bigger production of Eddie & Jenny that we will tour to major theatres in the West Country in the first half of 2027 and then we will go to other UK theatres.