She’s a down-to-earth Northerner…she’s incredibly funny and emotional, with a glorious voice.

Lesley Garrett is a singing whirlwind. She sweeps fans in her wake and gives them the exciting ride they want.

Garrett is of course, a natural communicator and just about the best ambassador for opera.

Lesley Garrett is superb as The Mother Abbess. As well as being a great actor, her singing is sublime – rarely has a first act ended so spectacularly at the St James Theatre as it does with Garrett’s Climb Ev’ry Mountain.

When Garrett sang the stirring ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’, and reprised it for the final scene…she moved the mesmerised audience to goosebumps, cheers and a few tears. An absolutely stellar performance.

There were two exhilarating production numbers for Lesley Garrett…Huge fun: Garrett was, is and always will be a star.

Lesley Garrett is back – and on fine diva form. She could teach ENO a thing or two….

Garrett gives a sublime performance – her acting skills, sharpened on the West End stage, to the fore.

Lesley Garrett’s performance is good enough to silence any naysayers – time spent treading the boards in West End musicals has sharpened her acting skills and clarified her diction. She is wholly credible; trembling nervously at the start, chain-smoking and passing the receiver shakily from hand to hand.

She is a very expressive performer and makes the anguish of being dumped over the course of a 40-minute phone conversation painfully clear.

Lesley Garrett also endows the Mother Abbess with a genuine humanity and even manages to deliver Climb Every Mountain as a song of aspiration rather than asecular hymn.

Add Lesley Garrett as a Mother Superior with a voice so ample and rich that it shrinks thre Palladium to the size of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and she, Fisher and Hanson, could be in their jobs for years.

Lesley Garrett is phenomenal, with her gates-of-heaven-battering voice as the Mother Abbess, and she signals with warm wit this head nun’s understanding of Maria.

That operatic atomic kitten Lesley Garrett has long since made the great cross-over into showbusiness.

Second on the billing is soprano Lesley Garrett as The Fairy Godmother. Making her entrance on a wire, Garrett never takes herself too seriously, even when she gives us a rousing rendition of The Impossible Dream in the second half.

As the prima donna-ish Mrs Leonara Fflyte, Lesley Garrett provides a necessary relief from the comic action with her beautiful unaccompanied singing of familiar passages from The Messiah and elsewhere. When the opportunity presents itself, she demonstrates comic skills that equal those of the men.

There is a scene-stealing cameo from Lesley Garrett as the Rutland family matriarch

To link these and provide commentary, there as an MC figure, Lesley Garrett, in sparkling form whose performance included playing both male and female characters, singing narrative patter songs and a very, very saucy music hall song.

But it is Garrett, in the least glamorous role of her career, who really commands the attention. “I walk the streets of the city, a middle-aged woman who nobody sees,” she laments. But it is the cognitive dissonance of a dowdy woman giving vent in such an expressive soprano that establishes Simpson’s essential point that ordinary people have opera-sized emotions too.

All four of the soloists were first rate, with Lesley Garrett’s downtrodden Val a revelation. Her diction and vocal projection were excellent and she brought to the performance genuine emotion and pathos.

Objectively she may be thought of as a rather mature choice for Despina, but the character plays to her strengths and justly-founded reputation for soubrette parts, singing with freshness and acting with irrepressible vigour and mischief, and offsetting Don Alfonso’s sternness effectively.