National Lottery’s Big Night of Musicals at the AO Arena, Manchester. Performed on 22 January 2024, broadcast on BBC1 on 27 January and now available on iPlayer.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩It might have been musicals overload for many Saturday night stay-at-homes but for lovers of the genre it was sheer bliss… six and a half hours to gorge themselves, first with the annual National Lottery love-in with 12,000 singing-along fans at Manchester’s AO Arena, then a quick channel switch to catch five hours of more show songs, a documentary on the noble baron himself, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and finally two hours of another West End legend, Elaine Paige.
Congratulations to those who lasted the course, no doubt most will have recorded it and watched it in bits, but whatever way, let the BBC know we want more Saturdays like it.
The stars and casts of the top shows were out in force to support the National Lottery concert, seen live in Manchester on 22 January and shown on BBC1 five days later. But the industry’s invaluable backroom teams – which make the industry tick – were not forgotten either.
Kilted Graham Simpson was recognised for 30 years’ service as an usher in Scottish theatreland – Craig Revel Horwood made the presentation – and the young wannabes from Next Generation Youth Theatre and the Pendleton School in Salford who joined Beverley Knight, who started out that way herself, in ‘Seasons of Love’ from Rent got the thrill of their young lives.
Good too to see thriving theatre outside the West End celebrated with ‘One’ from Leicester Curve’s stunning tour of A Chorus Line. London has to wait until Sadler’s Wells in July to catch this sparkling revival.
The versatile Jason Manford, an old hand at this sort of thing, presided over proceedings brilliantly, even taking part in an excerpt from the touring show he’s currently appearing in, The Wizard of Oz. He did his best to encourage folk to see more theatre and not be put off by high prices, saying there were even seats as cheap as £10 to be had, because he’s had them, if you knew where to look.
The show, lavish and spectacular, started as it meant to go on with jugglers, acrobats, contortionists, dancers and stars, stars, stars coming together for ‘This is the Greatest Show’ from The Greatest Showman and went merrily into Yeukayi Ushe as the Genie singing ‘Friend Like Me’ from Disney’s Aladdin. Then Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s ‘Your Song’ was so gorgeously performed by Dom Simpson and Tanisha Spring it made me want to book straight away for Moulin Rouge. Now where do I get those £10 tickets, Jason?
Maybe I’d have better luck with Operation Mincemeat, the comedy that’s gone from a tiny Fringe theatre to the West End, garnering 64 five-star reviews along the way, one of the great fairy tales for the cast of five playing almost ten times as many characters.
From one new success story to an old one that’s off the scale, seen by a 160 million people. That would be The Phantom of the Opera, and serenading us with the title song, Jon Robyns and Lily Kerhoas blew us away; as did the four Jean Valjeans from that other mega-hit Les Misérables, Alfie Boe’s towering tenor dominating the stage, with Killian Donnelly, Milan van Waardenburg and Pete Jöback doing it their less flamboyant way.
The wonderful Nicole Scherzinger dropped in for a chat, not to sing anything from Sunset Boulevard – she received rave reviews in Jamie Lloyd’s mind-popping reimagining of one of Lloyd Webber’s best scores – but to say how thrilled she was to be making her Broadway debut in the transfer, along with her co-stars from the Savoy.
New star Aviva Tulley, Dorothy in the touring The Wizard Of Oz, was cute and charming on ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, surely the most famous of all show numbers, and we also had a turn from The Vivienne as the Wicked Witch of the West.
But for me the three highlights of this stacked love letter to musical theatre were Daniel Boys with his sneering, spot-on George III in Hamilton’s comic showstopper ‘You’ll Be Back’, Ivano Turco’s searing ‘The Wall in My Head’ from Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, just arriving at London’s Peacock Theatre for a six-week stay, and Cedric Neal’s ‘Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat’, his one big moment as Nicely-Nicely Johnson in Guys & Dolls, the hit show I’ll be lapping up for a fourth time in March when it celebrates its first birthday at the Bridge Theatre when reinforcements are at hand. A number of cast changes include Jonathan Andrew Hume taking over from Neal. It’s going to be a hard act to follow.
Michael Ball and Layton Williams popped in for a bit of ‘Pure Imagination’ and a Grease megamix rounded off a hectic 90-minute broadcast. It was quite a feat to shoehorn in so many shows and a great primetime shop window for British musical theatre at its most diverse and distinctive.
The numbers from Mrs Doubtfire and the Broadway import Hadestown (opens at the Lyric on 24 February) didn’t float my boat but they will have thrilled others. With so many different types of musicals on display, that’s bound to happen. Win some, lose some. But the quality on that AO stage was beyond dispute. Well done to all.
Jeremy Chapman
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