Getting the role felt like a full-circle moment, she said, having visited Birmingham Hippodrome – where she is performing a leg of the show – as a child.<\/p>\n
She has also loved theatre since she was young.<\/p>\n
“Worcester was a wonderful place to grow up in the arts, I was part of so many shows, amateur companies, I did classical music and musical theatre,” she said.<\/p>\n
“[The Barnum show] is extravagant, it’s spectacular, it’s trying to be what Barnum was presenting which was just humbugging the audience, bedazzling them with nonstop sights.”<\/p>\n
Ashmore’s ability to perform at all could be considered a miracle – as a teenager she had four cardiac arrests during one night, and her dad saved her life by performing CPR.<\/p>\n
She now has an advanced pacemaker.<\/p>\n
“I was definitely afraid that performing would be too intense a lifestyle after such a big surprise and health issues, but I think it goes to show I had a lot of support – I worked really hard to make theatre accessible to me,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It really shows that from the absolute depths of fear, you can totally come back and follow your dreams.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Getting the role felt like a full-circle moment, she said, having visited Birmingham Hippodrome – where she is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-548304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}