Ramin Karimloo beats Ball & Barrowman to win WOS leading men poll

The results are in of our recent leading men poll, and it was a close
run thing! Over 2,500 of you let us know your favourite West End leading
man of recent times and submitted questions for our quiz (take part
below).

Top of the pile was Ramin Karimloo, star of The Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies (for which he won a 2011 Whatsonstage.com Award) and Les Miserables, who claimed 21 percent of the votes.

He was closely followed by fellow
Whatsonstage.com Award winners Michael Ball (18%) and John Barrowman (17%), who were separated by a margin of just four votes in second and third place respectively.

The top ten was completed by: Lee Mead (12%), John Owen Jones (9%),
Daniel Boys (6%), Michael Crawford (5%), Alex Gaumond (3%),
Philip Quast and Bertie Carvel (2%).

We ran the poll in response to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s comment on Superstar that there are “so few leading men in theatre” – and think it’s fair to say we’ve proved him wrong!

Now for the next stage. How well do you know your leading men? In partnership with Quiz Factor,
we’ve put together a quiz to sort the leading men from the boys. By
completing the 20 questions (be warned that there’s a time limit of 20
seconds on each one), you could be in with a chance to win a hamper.