The National Lottery’s Big Night Of Musicals – AO Arena, Manchester

The National Lottery’s Big Night Of Musicals at the AO Arena, Manchester, recorded for BBC1 and BBC Radio 2.

Was there any hankie big enough to disguise the tears when children and adults with learning difficulties, all members of David Stanley’s Music Man Project, joined Michael Ball during The National Lottery’s Big Night Of Musicals at the AO Arena, Manchester?

It was just one magic moment from a lavish production involving the casts of 13 shows either in the West End, touring or about to tour, just one of many that brought goosebumps and shivers down the spine. “It’s the joy, it’s the wonder,” just like Lesley Joseph said in one of the video clips.

Eat your heart out, David Hare. He’s the famous playwright who wrote a sniffy article in The Spectator saying the ratio of musicals to straight plays in the West End was too big. Well he would say that, wouldn’t he, as his best days are long gone.

If he wanted to see the reason, this full-power, extravagant concert, filmed at the end of last month and sadly only a once-a-year thrill, shouts out an emphatic answer. With a musical you get what’s on the tin, but too many bad nights with overlong, often depressing plays make the paying public think twice about shelling out.

This Big Night showed a bit of everything that turns us on to musicals. Who could fail to be moved as the current Eponine, Nathania Ong, poured her heart into ‘On My Own’ from Les Misérables? Or when host Jason Manford brought up young stars of the future from the local Pendleton Theatre School Choir and Flash Musicals Youth Theatre to back him on ‘From Now On’ from The Greatest Showman?

Even the simple beauty of ‘Shall We Dance?’ as performed by Helen George and Darren Lee from the touring production of The King And I (or Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King And I, as the graphics called it – is that to differentiate it from somebody else’s The King And I that we don’t know about?) got me going again, soppy old fool that I am.

And one-time Pussycat Doll Melody Thornton, whose tour with The Bodyguard continues until December 2023, wrung every last nuance out of ‘I Will Always Love You’, with a gorgeous saxophone solo thrown in. Even Whitney Houston would have found a tear.

There was a special performance by Ball of ‘Love Changes Everything’, the Lloyd Webber hit (it reached No. 2 in the charts) from Aspects of Love which revives at the Lyric in May with Ball, 34 years down the line from playing Alex in the original, swapping roles.

This was to celebrate the noble Lord’s 75th birthday and it clearly gave Ball much pleasure to say thanks to the man “who had the biggest impact on my life”. Cue congratulatory messages from, among others, Glenn Close (Sunset Boulevard) and Elaine Paige (Evita).

An audience of 12,000 lapped it all up, singing and swaying, joining in ‘I’m A Believer’ from Shrek The Musical (well, you have to, don’t you?) and ‘We Will Rock You’ which opened the show with a feast for eyes and ears.

Three numbers from Matilda The Musical went down a treat as long as you weren’t worried about the words. In the noisy group numbers they were often hard to decipher.

Six, one of the great success stories going from small beginnings to worldwide fame, Newsies (based on a real strike by newsboys in 1899), and Ain’t Too Proud, an all-singing, all-dancing tribute show to Motown legends The Temptations, added bounce and colour to the occasion.

Shows of slightly older vintage were also featured: Laura Pick’s ‘Defying Gravity’, one of Stephen Schwartz’s best, represented the evergreen Wicked, we had ‘My Shot’ from Hamilton which starts its first national tour in Manchester in November – and 2016 Strictly winners Joanne Clifton and Ore Oduba came on to tell us about the Rocky Horror Show tour which continues in Birmingham this week with Oduba playing Brad Majors.

And what a finale we had with Mamma Mia!’s ‘Dancing Queen’ almost blowing the AO roof off. But, as with last year’s show, Big Night embraced far more than what the audience actually get to see in the build-up to the finished product on tour.

We were taken behind the scenes of Heathers prior to their opening night in Windsor, every department from rehearsals, choreography, outfits, dressers, how sets are made, foyer staff – the whole circus only possible with amazing crews.

These productions give people who cannot get to the West End – or can’t afford to – the best show they can and as someone said “it couldn’t be done without National Lottery funding”.

Big Night Of Musicals was shot on 27 February at the AO Arena and trimmed to 95 minutes for TV consumption. The broadcast is now available on iPlayer and you can also listen to a two-hour broadcast of the show on BBC Sounds. Once a year isn’t enough!

Jeremy Chapman

[Sadly, the Andrew Lloyd Webber tribute during The Big Night Of Musicals was broadcast on the same evening it was announced that the composer’s son Nicholas had died at the age of 43.]