Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary are a London-based musical theatre writing partnership. They met at Bristol University, where they were studying Drama and Music respectively.
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Their first musical Jet Set Go! ran at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival at George Square Theatre. Following the Festival it played a short sell-out season at the acclaimed Theatre 503 in London. A new production in April 2009 ran at Jermyn Street Theatre with a cast including Mark Evans and Tim Driesen.
Jet Set Go! is published and licensed by Josef Weinbeger Ltd. The amateur premiere took place at Cambridge University in February 2011, a production which subsequently opened at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2011.
Their second musical The Great British Soap Opera ran at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Festival - again at George Square Theatre - and subsequently transferred for a two-week run at Jermyn Street Theatre in September 2009. The cast included Philippa Buxton and Leon Kay.
In 2010, Brunger and Cleary were commissioned to write the stage adaptation of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series, which received a workshop at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith.
In August 2011 Brunger and Cleary wrote a new musical for Youth Music Theatre: UK (YMT) called Lost and Found, which was directed by Gemma Farlie.
Brunger and Cleary were nominated for the 2010 Stiles and Drewe Prize for Best Song, which was judged at a ceremony at the Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. Prior to that, Cleary was nominated for the Notes for the Stage competition, and was also a finalist for the 2011 Tim Williams Award. She won the 2009 Music Theatre Matters Award in recognition of her composition for both Jet Set Go! and The Great British Soap Opera.
Jet Set Go! received rave reviews both in Edinburgh and London. Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph described it as ‘a delightful, inventive and witty new musical’[1] and Jay Richardson in The Scotsman wrote “scripted by the precociously talented 21-year-old Jake Brunger, Jet Set Go! is one of those rare, unexpected delights”.[2] The 2009 production at Jermyn Street Theatre received Time Out Critics’ Choice.
The Great British Soap Opera was likewise well received by critics. Sally Stott in The Scotsman wrote ‘there's a sophisticated structure underpinning the story in which "real" life and TV fiction run as parallels... it's all great fun, surprisingly clever and just like a real soap you'll find yourself getting drawn in despite yourself’.[3] In London, Nina Caplan in Time Out described the musical as “more welcome than any profound examination of these putrid times”[4] .