On the eve of its Sydney opening, Limelight catches up with the show’s award winning composer, Grant Olding.

According to the UK’s Daily Mail “the funniest show on the planet” is about to hit Sydney. Judging by the reviews for the National Theatre of Great Britain’s smash hit comedy One Man, Two Guvnors, at the Adelaide Festival over the last couple of weeks, this isn’t far off the mark.

Directed by the National Theatre’s Nicholas Hytner, Richard Bean’s clever update of Carlo Goldoni’s 18th-century The Servant of Two Masters is a glorious celebration of British comedy: a mix of satire, slapstick and one-liners set in the seaside town of Brighton in the swinging 60s. But there’s another ingredient that has become something of a cult all of its own, wherever the show has played: the onstage band, The Craze. Limelight caught up with the show’s composer, and sometime Craze front man, Grant Olding, and asked him how the idea had come about.

“There was always going to be a live band in the show”, he explains, “but we didn’t quite know what they were going to be doing. The first conversation I had with Nick Hytner was that it would...