It was a little surreal earlier this week to watch characters from 17 long-running West End shows chatting on stage.
Who’d have thought we’d have ever seen Joey from War Horse whinnying over Frankie Valli’s shoulder, Billy Elliot chatting to Bruce Bogtrotter or Michael Jackson standing alongside The Phantom Of The Opera. Yet at the New London theatre that’s exactly what happened. To be honest, I almost had to ask an inhabitant of Oz to pinch me just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.
You may have seen the glorious resulting image highlighting all the shows eligible for the BBC Radio 2 Audience Award – the only entirely publicly voted award at the Olivier Awards with MasterCard – in The Guardian earlier this week. [If you didn’t, you can see it here]. But here are our exclusive images of the characters and performers preparing for that momentous moment.