Review on The 24 Hours Musical Celebrity Gala with Colin Morgan, Anthony Head, Freddie Fox, and a handful of other talented people.

ultimatefandomfangirl:

PLEASE TAKE NOTE THAT I WILL BE DOING TWO REVIEWS FOR THIS EVENT: This one especially for the Merlin fans because Colin Morgan (Merlin)  and Anthony Head (Uther) were in it and then I will do another review for the whole show, which was absolutely amazing and got me to re-think my career plans.

On December 9 I had the chance to assist to the 24 Hours Musical Celebrity Gala, the annual fundraising event for The Old Vic Theatre, a beautiful theatre near the London Eye, in London.

The Gala was hosted by Matt Lucas, which for non-british people (like me) is a quite popular humorist right now. The play consisted of in introduction with Kevin Spacey (American Beauty) and a special appearance from Jeff Goldblum (Jurassic Park). After a short introduction by the host, we were shown a short video summarizing the last 22 hours spent building the different shows. The video was pretty funny and showed how the groups worked and what people had brought to help them complete this challenge.

Let’s talk about the show now. Colin was the first actor to appear on stage, wearing the following things: pink and white trainers, bright pink trousers, a striped pink and white shirt, a waist banana bag (I hope you know what it is, if not, please do tell) and a pink headband in the hair, a bit like the blue one Joey Ritcher wears in A Very Potter Musical. Let’s just say, Colin has a presence on stage that I haven’t seen very often… but then again I haven’t seen many shows over the past few years as I am, in fact, Canadian and the theatre culture isn’t quite the same as in London.

Colin’s character was named Garry, a dance teacher who sounded very very gay. Colin’s seemed to have modified his voice a bit for that. The short musical consisted of a dance class where everybody lies about themselves to make themselves fit in more easily. The main characters are a young man (Freddie Fox) which follows the dancing class and his mother, who burst into the classroom at the beginning, wanting to know what is wrong with his son. It turns out he young man is in love with a 50 years old woman who follows the class wit hhim, and who knows his mother. Another character is an apparent polish girl (Katherine Kingsley) who is not, in fact, polish. Secrets spills during the musical, and it turns out that the polish girl isn’t polish, the old woman isn’t in love with the young man and merely wanted to piss the young man’s mother off. As for Garry (Colin Morgan) he is not, in fact gay.

That part was one of the funniest to me, because it’s total chaos on the stage at this point as everybody question’s everybody’s secrets, and Colin just stands in the middle, shouting: “I’M NOT GAY!!!” and then explains that he tough people wouldn’t take him seriously as a dance teacher if he wasn’t gay, so (and this is a line I really loved) he is sorry for “Coming…in” as straight (instead of coming out as gay). He even gets a girl because of that! (the fake-polish girl).

That first musical had a lot of lines and maybe less signing than in the others, but yes, Colin did danced a bit, including some valse, some really funny “legs in the air” moves and did sang a bit with the others. He sings right, not as a Broadway actor, but definitely not bad or anything. That’d be very interesting if he worked on his voice, because it sounds really low.

After they were over with their musical, Colin and his former colleagues sneaked into the third stall, where Ellie (vickivantoch on tumblr) had our seat, so we actually watched ¾ of the show with Colin and his former co-stars at less than 20 feet away from us. Which was rather nice (well, nice is an understatement).

As for Anthony Head, he played in the third musical, to which I had a hard time following because they were talking really fast and the plot seemed confusing (well maybe the second cocktail during the interval didn’t help). From what I understood, he played a man who is secretly in love with a woman who’s being left by her former boyfriend. His role was short and sweet, but oh my god, the man can sing really well.

This is probably the first and the last time I am able to see Colin and/or Anthony perform on stage and it has been an amazing experience. As if the evening wasn’t already brilliant enough, We nearly ran into Andrew Scott (Moriarty in BBC Sherlock) in front of the theatre. I was so unprepared for this (which doesn’t make sense, it was the Old Vic Celebrity Gala after all) I just stared at him, which didn’t look too creppy considering he was with other people and not facing me at all.

I didn’t ask for an autograph or anything, because I have some issues with asking actors autographs or pictures when they are not working (aka filming in a public space, on the red carpet or in front of a building they just left for work purposes) so I just let it sank that I had just seen a pretty good handful of really nice actors and English celebrities over the evening and enjoyed it with my eyes.

I am sorry that I don’t have any good pictures of the play, it was 1)forbidden and 2) when I tried to take some with my phone, it was so bright on the stage that all the pictures of the actors consists of white shapes on the stage. I may post them anyways if you wish me to.

So, in all, 75 pounds for this event was totally worth it. This is the kind of event that really gets you into theatre. As I said at the beginning, I’m really considering starting to do some theatre because frankly, it looked like so much fun I felt like I wanted to BE in the show instead of only watching it.

If you have any questions or commentaries about the play, please ask, it’ll be a pleasure to answer you. A review of the whole event will follow in the next few days. I just wanted to give something for the Merlin/Colin Morgan/Anthony Head fans something to read about.

Hoble xxx