Guy Hughes
Guy is a Bristol based actor, composer, musical director and vocal coach. He studied music at Durham University, where he graduated with a first class honours degree, before taking up a scholarship place at the Royal Academy of Music to study Musical Theatre performance. Since completing his studies with a distinction and the Toni V Fell prize for speech into song, he has worked all over the UK with companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company, Cheek By Jowl, Shakespeare’s Globe, Bristol Old Vic, Edinburgh Lyceum, and Liverpool Everyman. As an actor and musician, Guy has worked with some of the UK’s best-known theatre directors, including Declan Donellan OBE (author of The Actor and the Target), Emma Rice, Tom Morris, Polly Findlay, Iqbal Kahn, Nick Bagnall and Wils Wilson.
Guy also works as a vocal and performance coach in a number of drama schools around the country, having qualified with an LRAM in Musical Theatre Singing from the Royal Academy of Music. He studied the Estill voice model under renowned vocal coach Mary Hammond (vocal coach to Chris Martin, Lily Allen, Florence and the Machine and many others) and Anne-Marie Speed, founder of The Voice Explained.
As a composer, he has written music for a wide range of projects for theatre, screen and large-scale events. He recently co-wrote music for Our Wilder Family, a 16-minute drone show as part of the closing weekend for Coventry City of Culture 21/22, collaborating with BAFTA and Ivor Novello award-winning composer Dan Jones. This multimedia, large-scale event was witnessed by a live audience of 27,000 people in War Memorial Park in Coventry, as well as attracting an online audience of over 13,000.
In 2019, Guy co-wrote and co-produced a new musical comedy, The Lost Musical Works of Willy Shakes, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe. The show received a collection of five-star reviews from top Fringe publications including ThreeWeeks and Broadway Baby, and was included in TheTelegraph’s Top 20 shows to see at the Fringe 2019 (“Very Funny; musically deft”, lead Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish).
Guy is the composer and musical director for the internationally-renowned cycling theatre company, The HandleBards, having collaborated since their inaugural tour in 2012 on 14 different Shakespeare productions. Other commissions and collaborations as composer and musical director have included: numerous shows with New Old Friends playing at Theatre Royal Bath and around the country; TheRoyal Shakespeare Company (Playmaking Festival 2020); Bristol Old Vic (Angels in Bristol, Cyrano, Twelfth Night); Greenwich and Docklands International Festival (Lullaby).
