Cast: Essex Cuts Footloose, Harada Qs, All WickedDate: 12 May 2006
In West End musical casting updates, the full company of Wicked has now been announced, pop star David Essex joins Footloose and Ann Harada will play Christmas Eve in Avenue Q.
At the Apollo Victoria, where Wicked receives its UK premiere on 27 September 2006 (previews from 7 September), Australian Helen Dallimore will play ‘good witch’ Glinda, opposite, as already reported, original Broadway cast member (and Tony Award Winner) Idina Menzel as Elphaba. Dallimore has worked extensively for the Sydney Theatre Company, and makes her West End debut in the role.
Also now confirmed for the cast are Katie Rowley Jones (Beauty and the Beast, Whistle Down the Wind) as Nessarose, James Gillan (Assassins, Starlight Express) as Boq, and Martin Ball (Mamma Mia!, Dead Funny) as Doctor Dillamond.
Kerry Ellis (We Will Rock You, Les Miserables) will be standby for Elphaba before taking over the role in January 2007, and Annalene Beechey (Into the Woods, A Little Night Music) will be the standby for Glinda. They join other previously announced cast members, Miriam Margolyes and Nigel Planer as, respectively, Madame Morrible and The Wizard.
Wicked tells the “untold story” of the Witches of Oz - popular blonde Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, and her spin-victim friend Elphaba, the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West – who were both immortalised in the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz. The show has a book by Winnie Holtzman, based on Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Music and lyrics are by Stephen Schwartz (Pippin, Godspell). It’s directed by Joe Mantello and designed by Eugene Lee.
David Essex (pictured) will join the West End cast of Footloose, taking over from Stephen McGann as the Rev Shaw Moore at the Novello Theatre for three months from 5 June 2006.
Although best known as a pin-up crooner, Essex was cast as Jesus Christ in the original London production of Godspell (with music by Stephen Schwartz), and subsequently played Che in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s original cast of Evita. He has starred in numerous plays, including Peter Hall’s 1993 production of She Stoops to Conquer, alongside Miriam Margolyes, and co-wrote the musical Mutiny!. Essex will star alongside Cheryl Baker, of Bucks Fizz fame, as his wife.
Following extensive UK tours, Footloose, based on the popular 1984 teen film of the same name, opened in the West End on 12 April 2006 (previews from 8 April). The musical centres on city boy Ren who moves with his mother to a small town in middle America where rock music and dancing are outlawed for religious reasons. Sparks fly when Ren and the minister's teenaged daughter Ariel rebel. The film version starred Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer.
The stage adaptation has a book by Walter Bobbie and Dean Pitchford, who wrote the original screenplay. Footloose is directed and choreographed by Karen Bruce and produced by Mark Goucher, Michael Rose, Tristan Baker and Jason Haigh-Ellery.
Original Broadway cast member Ann Harada will reprise her role as Christmas Eve in the West End premiere of another Broadway musical, Avenue Q, which opens at the Noel Coward Theatre (formerly the Albery) on 28 June 2006 (previews from 1 June). Harada originated the role of Christmas Eve in New York when it first opened at the off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre in 2002, transferring to the Golden Theatre the following year.
The offbeat show – billed as a musical form of Sesame Street meets South Park - features a cast of just seven humans, three of them playing humans, the rest manipulating multiple puppets that include a closet gay puppet called Rod, a porn-addicted puppet called Trekkie Monster, and a puppet looking for love called Kate Monster (See News, 17 Feb 2006). The rest of the already announced Avenue Q cast includes Giles Terera, Julie Atherton, Jon Robyns, Simon Lipkin, Clare Foster and Sion Lloyd.
- by Caroline Ansdell
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