Abbie Osmon

Abbie Osmon

Age:

Currently: Flying high—literally—as Laura Michelle Kelly's replacement Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in which she opened February 4, wearing the double corset required for the part ("The second one is more of an armour for when it's time for war.") Because Kelly has been the first principal player to leave the company, Osmon reports, "It was a strange but wonderful thing to have an opening night on your own; everyone else was calm and without nerves because they'd been doing the show for over a year now, which made me calm. The crazy thing about this is, obviously I knew how much had gone into the production because I had a couple of friends in it, so, if anything, I knew what an amazing process it had been and how long they had tech’ed for. A cast member leant me video footage that had been taken through the whole process, so I was able to watch a lot of it and gain a sense of what I was coming into: all the painstaking energy."

Hometown: Frimley, near Guildford in Surrey, "a beautiful part of the world." Osmon's mother, a music teacher, "actually taught me at school" and would take her daughter to weekly Saturday classes at the Royal Academy of Music in London's Marylebone Road. "I did flute and piano; I was too young for them to train my voice back then." Her father worked as an air traffic controller at Heathrow though both parents have since retired north to Scotland.

Up, Up and Away: As Elena Roger's alternate Eva Peron for a year in the recent West End revival of Evita, Osmon did have to sing "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" from the balcony of the Casa Rosada some 150 times, but that was nothing, she says, compared to the aerial demands of Galadriel in a show she saw on three occasions before actually stepping into its defining female part herself. "I haven't got a fear of heights but it is a long way up," says Osmon of a character that she describes as "mystical and with so much magic. This isn't a real person; she's someone higher than that."

Abbie Osmon as Galadriel

Safety First: "I'm lucky that I was made to feel very safe because, you know, the show has been open a year so more and more safety measures have come in. I've been bombarded with this incredibly vast quantity of safety measures." At the same time, what Galadriel does, Osmon points out, is nothing "compared to what the guys are doing around me—bungee jumping with ropes, flinging themselves all over the place. The guys have to learn how to stilt walk, how to tumble, how to fly: it's like Cirque du Soleil, and nothing can really prepare you for that." So her studies at north London's Mountview, from which Osmon graduated five years ago, didn't include acrobatics? She laughs: "All those things drama schools wish they could teach you, like how to walk in ludicrously high shoes" (nine inches off the ground, to be precise, "with lifts," Osmon says, "like ice skates").

Boys' Town: The J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy is so iconically blokish, does it hold any appeal for the fairer sex? "I loved the films; I thought they were fantastic, and I had read the books which were around the house when I was growing up, though I wasn't sure when I saw the movies how much I'd remember of them. I've always been a dreamer, so anything that was fantasy has always interested me. I was quite a girly-girl, so I was fascinated by these women [like Galadriel] who had something more about them—that girl power. Galadriel really had that: this was a woman in a man's world who was stronger than any of the characters—more powerful than Gandalf, more powerful than any of them; she's the wise owl, really. And I think that just really fascinated me; I think any fantastical dreamlike strong woman fascinated me."

Size Queen: Osmon has played her share of imposing women in big venues—not just Eva Peron and Galadriel but in the Dominion Theatre ensemble of We Will Rock You ("I was a huge Queen fan growing up"), understudying Jenna Lee James as Meatloaf. "I seem to land all these huge things all the time; I love it." Osmon says she was primed for the task by doing stadium gigs and appearing before 70,000 people on tour with Mike and the Mechanics, who were opening for Phil Collins on his first farewell tour. "All that's easy," she laughs. "The difficult thing is playing to 250 people and doing material by Stephen Sondheim which is so intricate that you just cannot get it wrong." That was Osmon's immediate post-Evita task last year in the Venue revival of Side By Side By Sondheim, in which her allotted songs included nothing less than "Broadway Baby," "Another Hundred People" and "Losing My Mind." Of that last (and legendary) torch song from Follies, Osmon notes deadpan, "Getting through that without crumbling into a crying mess on the floor was a good test every night."