National Lottery’s Big Night of Musicals – the title feels like an understatement

It’s the musical equivalent of a fireworks display. The numbers aren’t so much delivered as launched into the atmosphere, the performers firing on all cylinders. By the confetti-strewn end, the title feels like an understatement.

The National Lottery’s Big Night of Musicals, broadcast on BBC One this weekend, opens with pyrotechnics and a circus of acrobats – some corkscrewing up and down aerial silk, others forming human towers on each other’s shoulders – who fill the stage before peeling away for host Jason Manford to announce himself, literally, as the greatest showman.

It’s not all loud bangs though. The first performance is Aladdin’s “Friend Like Me”: a more contained number with compact choreography. Moulin Rouge!’s “Your Song” gives us a tender duet in front of a backdrop of the twinkling Parisian night, audience’s phone torches completing the constellation.

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The performances are arranged to balance these songs with the piercing soprano of “The Phantom of the Opera” or Aviva Tulley’s soaring “Over the Rainbow”.

Choreography sings, too. High-kicking lines zip and cut across the stage in A Chorus Line, or form whirling circles like gold swans. There’s similar kinetic motion and undulation in one of musical theatre’s most recent runaway hits, the Bridge Theatre’s Guys and Dolls, whose ensemble’s sitting up and down creates turbulent waves in “Rock the Boat”.

Not that the crowd-pleasers need a busy stage. As Hamilton’s King George, Daniel Boys makes us his subjects in his smug solo “You’ll be Back”, happily furnishing him with all the “da-da-da” fanfare, before he slowly struts off stage.

But one of the high points doesn’t come from the pros. Next Gen Youth Theatre and Pendleton School of Theatre take up their surprise invitation to perform, with children scurrying on for a remarkably confident “Seasons of Love”, notes falling at the end like autumnal leaves.

There is the new – a preview of Hadestown; a flurry of clothes and dancers for the brisk transformation in Mrs Doubtfire’s “Make Me a Woman” – alongside the stalwarts, such as Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. A special line-up of Jean Valjeans from different productions of Les Misérables, culminating in Alfie Boe, gradually drifts on like summoned ghosts for a spine-tingling “Bring Him Home”.

There’s other musical-theatre royalty and star wattage from Beverley Knight, Daniel Mays and even Nicole Scherzinger who breezes through to reminisce about Sunset Boulevard before its Broadway transfer.

It’s a display of how broad and diverse – how big – that category of ‘musical’ is. Behind-the-scenes videos share how much work is involved, too, including a feat of costume changes and multi-roling in Operation Mincemeat.

Admiration and awe beams from Manford throughout, dazzled by the talent but also the commitment to arts imperilled by elusive funding. His interviews return continuously to the importance of theatre in young lives and at grassroots, so there are future generations of big hitters. It’s a point the show makes emphatically. And if the government wanted to know if theatre is worth bothering with, 12,000 people pour out at the end who could give them an equally emphatic answer.