EMT: 2015
Alison Guill graduated with a First Class Honours degree studying classical singing at the Royal Academy of Music before defecting to the musical theatre course for postgraduate studies in the very same building. After receiving a DipRAM for an outstanding public performance as Cinderella in ‘Into the Woods’, her first professional role was to sing Fiordiligi in Cosi fan Tutte for Opera UK’s inaugural season. Other awards at RAM included the D’Oyly Carte Fund and the Ronald William White Prize.
Alison’s training and flexibility has allowed her to repeatedly cross the genres of opera and musical theatre. She has sung with the chorus of Opera Holland Park, Opera North at the Barbican, and again with Opera UK performing the role of Violetta in La Traviata. Musical theatre credits include “Scrooge” (UK National Tour), “Showboat” at the Royal Albert Hall, Sister Sophia in “The Sound of Music” (Original UK National Tour) and cover Carlotta in “Phantom of the Opera” at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, which she performed over 70 times . She appeared in the British Premiere of “Light in the Piazza” at Leicester Curve and was invited to return to understudy the lead role of Anna in “The King and I”. During rehearsals, she was asked also to understudy the role of Lady Thiang and performed this a number of times.
Throughout Alison’s performance career, she maintained a keen interest in the nurturing of young talent and over the past 15 years has been invited as a guest lecturer to many UK performing arts colleges giving masterclasses in vocal technique, style and performance. She has been on the faculty at Chichester University, the Urdang Academy, Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, London Studio Centre and coming full circle, Professor on the Musical Theatre course at the Royal Academy of Music since 2018. Alison is proud to be an Estill Master Trainer, having completed the pathway with Anne-Marie Speed in 2015.
Since the birth of her two boys, Alison has been devising her own cabaret ‘Motherhood’ which she has performed a number of times and is developing further. During the numerous lockdowns, Alison organised a number of online cabarets, most notably ‘Cocktails and Cabaret’ which she was delighted to share with some recent RAM grads, raising over £800 for Acting for Others and the RAM Hardship Fund, and ‘Motherhood: Locked Down’ after the last homeschooling debacle, raising over £1300 for Cancer Research UK.