BWW Interviews: Damian Humbley On Christmas Show and FORBIDDEN BROADWAY!

Hello Damian! Welcome to BWW:UK. Tell us a little bit about your forthcoming concerts in East Anglia - 'A West End Musical Christmas'.

I love working this time of year, all the Christmas concerts and gigs - really gets you in the spirit!

And what a great group of colleagues you have (Alison Jiear, Jo Gibb and Andrew Playfoot).

Yes! Ali and I have worked together before, we've done a couple of workshops together; and I've worked with Jo and Andy on various things - but the four of us have never actually worked together as a foursome. So this'll be great fun. Andy's got a cracking voice - beautiful low baritone; Jo is stunning, and Ali can sing anything under the sun - so between the four of us I think we can have a crack at anything.

How do you go about rehearsing? Will you get much time together?

I finish Forbidden Broadway, then we all have other gigs, and have one day where we come together, then come back together with the band a week before the show. That's more time than usual!

Do you know what you'll be singing yet or has that got to be worked out?

No, we've got the order up and running - the first act is going to be traditional musical theatre, things like My Fair Lady, I'm doing a lovely arrangement of The Impossible Dream, Andy's doing Old Man River. Then the second act is all Christmas! Carols and the classics - Crosby, Sinatra, and getting the audience singing along. The concert hall is exquisite! Ali says the sound is superb, so it'll be a nice afternoon and night. It'll be fun - four people working in our different fields and come together for Christmas. That's the joy of working in theatre.

So you finish in Forbidden Broadway this week...

This week! Anyone who hasn't seen it, get along and see it! I think it's one of those shows, if you love musical theatre you're going to love it because you know everything that's going on, but if you don't, you can enjoy the madcap craziness.

Like shouting 'potato' at the end of the Once skit?

Yeah! As much as we can!

It must be so much fun for you as musical theatre actors.

Yeah. It was pitched to me early on, and originally I said no. I love musical theatre. I think it's a great genre. A lot of people think it's just song-and-dance, blah blah blah. So I had a problem trying to get my head around taking the mickey out of it.

But David Babani [of the Chocolate Factory] and I had a long talk about how it's actually a love letter to the genre. It's saying that musical theatre should be the best it possibly can. The last three songs in the show are my favourite - it goes from Angela Lansbury to the corporate takeover to the last song, the Porgy and Bess number, that says I want to see a great show that makes me rise to my feet. As much as we've been taking the mickey for the last two hours, it's important to know that this is because we love theatre.

That's a really interesting way to put it. As you touch on, musical theatre gets a bit of a bad deal - people not thinking it's serious. You've done some fantastic musical comedies in your career, like Little Shop of Horrors and Lend Me A Tenor - people think it's silly, it's funny, but it's not, it can be more than that.

Absolutely. There's got to be heart. That's what makes it great. Look at Sondheim. The reason great musicals work is like Shakespeare - it has to go from prose into verse, it can no longer be told through mere dialogue. It needs to be more.

Damian Humbley stars in A West End Musical Christmas at Snape Concert Hall, Aldeburgh, on Tuesday 16th December (two shows, 4pm and 7.30pm); Forbidden Broadway closes this week.

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