Cast & Creative

Melinda Hughes

Melinda Hughes is an opera singer, satirical cabaret artist, writer, and comedian. She graduated with honours from the Maastricht Conservatory of Music, The Netherlands and returned to London to study as a postgraduate at the Royal College of Music. She completed her studies at The Brussels Opera Studio in Belgium then toured Europe for three years as the soloist with the André Rieu Strauss Orchestra, performing Operetta favourites with frequent appearances on Television and Radio.

Melinda has sung more than twenty soprano roles including Pamina, Madame Butterfly, The Countess, Aida, Violetta, and Fiordiligi, as well as oratorios and recitals in opera houses and concert halls around the world. She has toured extensively around Europe, The Middle East, and the USA.

Melinda is also a specialist in Weimar Cabaret having released two CDs 'Smoke & Noise’ and ‘Weimar & Back’ under the Nimbus Alliance Label. This led to a BBC Radio 4 programme about Weimar Cabaret with Barry Humphries. As a satirical cabaret artist, Melinda has collaborated with composer and comedian Jeremy Limb for over twenty years. Their musical satire has led to performances at The Al Bustan Festival Beirut, Holders Festival Barbados, The Hay Literary Festival, The Metropolitan Room and Don’t Tell Mama’s in New York, The Cotton House in Mustique as well as The Queen Elizabeth Hall, Cadogan Hall, and Crazy Coqs London.

Melinda spends part of the year in Barbados working on projects with local musicians, curating musical events. In 2023, she appeared as a special guest duetting with Cliff Richard for a charity benefit. She has written for Spears Magazine, The Spectator, and has been a regular guest on BBC Radio 3’s InTune. 

Jeremy Limb

Jeremy read music at Queen’s College, Oxford, then studied piano at the Royal College of Music. Since leaving the R.C.M., he has broadcast on BBC Radio 3 as part of their Young Artists’ Forum concert series and has given numerous recitals round the country. In 1997, he won 1st Prize in the 18th Brant National Piano Competition.

Jeremy works as a freelance musician in various capacities – soloist, accompanist, teacher, sight reader, repetiteur (including a lot of work for English National Opera and the SouthBank Centre) as well as arranger, composer, and performer of all types of music including jazz/pop.

Jeremy also writes and performs comedy, appearing regularly at the Pleasance (Edinburgh Fringe), and has had material used on BBC 1 by Harry Enfield. He was nominated for the LWT New Comedy Writing Award 1998 for his play Play Wisty for Me -The Life of Peter Cook (UK tour and Melbourne Comedy Festival 2002). Jeremy has recorded for the Naxos and Nimbus labels. He writes and performs regularly with Melinda.

Sarah Sigal

Originally from Chicago, Sarah Sigal is a writer, dramaturg, director, and researcher working across new writing, adaptation, site-specific theatre, film, and fiction. She has a BA in English Literature and Theatre Arts from Gettysburg College and an MA in Writing for Performance from Goldsmiths University of London where she also completed a PhD in Theatre and Performance. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

She has taught at numerous British universities as an associate lecturer and is the author of Writing in Collaborative Theatre-Making (Bloomsbury, 2016). She is a Dramaturgs’ Network Board Member, an Associate Fellow at the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre Research, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She was previously the Live Performance Programmer at JW3 (2016-2019), a LABA Fellow at the 14th St Y in New York (2019-2020), and a member of the BBC Writers’ Room (2013-2014).

Playwriting credits include: Vanishing (Camden People’s Theatre), Agent of Influence (Edinburgh Fringe & National Tour), World Enough and Time (Park Theatre), The Odyssey (The Albany), Alice’s Adventures in the New World (Old Red Lion & National Tour), and Dogfight (Arcola).

Directing credits include: Vanishing (Camden People’s Theatre), MARGO. Half Woman, Half Beast (London, Edinburgh Festival), Eating for Victory (Tea House Theatre), The Cold Clear Elsewhere (Edinburgh Festival), and The Spies Came in from the Cold (Pushkin House). She has recently directed her first short film No Caller and her first novel The Socialite Spy will be published in October 2023 by Lume Books.