After a summer on the Chichester Festival Theatre stage in the big-hit musical Oliver!, ten-year-old Toba Agbelusi has gone with the show to London.
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00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Really lovely
00:06to speak to Toba again, and this is super exciting. You had a summer on the Chichester
00:12Festival Theatre stage in Oliver, and now it's round two. You're going to the West End
00:17with the show, and you will be in the show until May. How exciting is that?
00:24It's really, really exciting. It's such a good feeling, like, I can almost hear the
00:30crowd's breath.
00:31Really?
00:32So it's such a good feeling, yeah.
00:34Oh, does that crowd, you had the summer obviously in Chichester, does the audience feel close
00:39to you when you're on the stage?
00:41Yeah, because in this one the audience is a lot closer to us, so, yeah, so like you
00:47can basically, they're basically kind of in the show, which is a really, really good feeling.
00:51Yeah, and you were saying when you were in Chichester this summer with it, you had butterflies
00:55to start with, which is understandable, but they were very, very useful, helpful butterflies,
01:00weren't they? What did you mean?
01:03So kind of like, on my second show, the butterflies just vanished, and then I felt like, I felt
01:16like it was, I felt like they vanished for a good reason, because in the next show I
01:23had no mistakes, I was really, I felt really good about myself when I finished all my acts,
01:31and when I did my bows with my friends I was so happy.
01:35And when you were in Chichester, were you thinking, were you daring to think about London,
01:39or were you just focusing on Chichester?
01:43Well, close to the end I was really hopeful that I would get to London, and when I found
01:49out I was so happy.
01:50Oh, and tell me again then, how did you find out? It came through as a text, didn't it?
01:56In email, yeah. So it was like two months ago, on Wednesday, and my parents said, well,
02:03Miss Bradbury, my headteacher, has come to tell us that, this, I was like, I'm in trouble,
02:11I am definitely in trouble. And then she was like, on behalf of Cameron Macintosh, I was
02:18like, that's not my headteacher, and she said, you're in the West End. I was so happy, I
02:25was jumping around, I couldn't sleep, I think I got to bed at like, 11 o'clock. Yeah.
02:33You're bound to be excited, you should be exciting, it is exciting, isn't it? And how
02:38much more work did you have to do before starting London? You couldn't just pick it
02:42up from Chichester, could you?
02:46No, we had to, it was a really, really long rehearsals. It was like back and forth, they'll
02:54tell you, like, they'll say, actually, no, you can have a break. The next time they'll
02:59say, actually, no, we need you. And I was like, okay. And we did like eight hour long
03:06rehearsals. It was really, really, it was quite a tiring, tiring thing. Yeah.
03:14And obviously, you're hoping this will be your career?
03:20Hopefully, yeah. Hopefully.
03:22Brilliant. Well, you've got it off to a fantastic start. Really lovely to speak to you
03:26again. And have a fantastic six months in the West End. That's unbelievable.
03:33Congratulations on you. Thank you.
03:36Bye.
03:37Bye bye.