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Hugh Wooldridge's annual gala charity tribute shows - this year benefiting the Variety Club Children's Charity and the Alan Jay Lerner Fund for Cancer Research and honouring director Trevor Nunn - are truly spectacular affairs.
With an orchestra of 40 and an onstage choir that is more than ten times that size, plus soloists who have graced Nunn's musical productions from both sides of the Atlantic, it offers a capsule career retrospective of 13 of the shows he has directed.
Sir Trevor is not a director known for his humility but even he might have been humbled by the event's massive scale and sense of occasion. And he is sure to have been touched by the appearance of one Ellie Nunn, singing Cosette's 'Castle on a Cloud' from Les Misérables with the kind of crystalline youthful soprano that suggests she may yet be going into the family business.
The show had other surprises, too, starting with Roger Moore gamely co-hosting proceedings with Glenn Close - he was to have starred in Nunn's production of Aspects of Love but withdrew during rehearsals when it was belatedly discovered that he could not actually sing, while Close stole the show with her rendition of Sunset Boulevard's 'With One Look' that she originated on Broadway.
Also on-hand was Joe Gillis, Alan Campbell, and the glorious original star of the ill-fated Broadway Chess, Judy Kuhn, who captivated with a new song specially written for that production, 'Someone Else's Story'. Amid the American vistors, British performances were perhaps under-represented but Sally Ann Triplett - from Nunn's most recent musical, Anything Goes - scintillated in 'Blow Gabriel Blow'.
© The Stage Newspaper Limited
