BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Keep your hair on! Michael WILL go to the ball 

Michael Ball will be boasting a scene-stealing, 54EEE treasure chest in the hit musical Hairspray when it moves to a brand new date in the autumn.

Ball won awards and accolades during the original run 13 years ago for his turn as larger-than-life laundress Edna Turnblad.

In addition to that awe-inspiring bust, Edna is also an agoraphobic whose liberated daughter Tracy coaxes her out of their Baltimore home to help shake up the civil rights movement, and the town, with joyous songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.

Hairspray, based on John Waters’ 1988 movie comedy of the same name, was to have begun previewing at the London Coliseum, home of English National Opera, on April 23.

Producer Adam Spiegel has revealed to me that it will now begin performances at the Coliseum on September 1, running through to November 8.

Spiegel said that he’d spoken to Ball ‘and he’s absolutely thrilled at the prospect of Hairspray actually starting’.

Director Jack O’Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell, as well as Ball and his co-star Paul Merton, principals including Lizzie Bea, Marisha Wallace and indeed the full company, had begun rehearsals on March 16, but shut down soon after as theatres across the UK were forced to bring down their curtains.

‘You Can’t Stop The Beat,’ said Spiegel, referring to one of the show’s signature numbers, ‘but it turns out you can pause it’.

Those who purchased seats will have a month from today to exchange their tickets for the new booking period: September 1 to November 8. From May 5 the remaining seats will go on general public sale.

It’s a gargantuan task. Nearly 100,000 people have bought tickets. ‘It’s a big job, like re-booking Wembley Stadium,’ Spiegel agreed. Should circumstances allow theatres to reopen earlier, say in August, Spiegel said he would consider shifting Hairspray to an earlier date.

When I pointed out the logistical nightmare that would entail, he replied sharply: ‘In the new world we’re operating in, I don’t mind logistical nightmares.’

But we’re not there yet. ‘As of now,’ Spiegel said, ‘Hairspray will begin at the London Coliseum on September 1.’

Meanwhile, he and the creative team are at an embryonic stage in exploring methods to engage actors during the lockdown. For instance, he said, ‘it may be that some of the music is taught in the early stages on internet platforms. We will have to come up with innovative new methods to cope with this extraordinary paralysis.’

And then there are discussions to be had about theatres being fully safe for audiences to return to. ‘Somehow the industry has got to find ways to adapt,’ Spiegel said.

Visit hairspraythemusical.co.uk for more information. Site goes live with new details from 9.30am BST today. 

Sky’s the limit for Edgy winner

The people of Sheffield clearly have a great love for Standing At The Sky’s Edge, the superb musical featuring music and songs by Richard Hawley.

The show, which returns to the city’s Crucible Theatre in November for a six-week season, has been selling advance seats like gangbusters.

Sky’s Edge, set in Sheffield’s iconic but brutalist ‘streets in the sky’ Park Hill estate, will run from November 30 through to January 9.

Hawley and book writer Chris Bush, both Sheffield natives, are working with director Rob Hastie (who is also the artistic chief of the Sheffield Theatres) and choreographer Lynne Page on slight revisions — including the addition of another of Hawley’s songs — for the forthcoming production.

The original storyline followed the disparate residents who lived in one of the flats from the 1960s to 2016. The plan now, however, is for it to continue on to the December 2019 election, in which Boris Johnson won a landslide.

The show, which is all about a sense of community, is perfectly suited to our times. So it’s fitting that its producer, Rupert Lord, has done a deal with the National Theatre, which will transfer it to its structure on the South Bank later in January — though dates could change because of the upheaval caused by the coronavirus lockdown.

Even so, it’s vital that Sky’s Edge, with Hawley’s haunting songs, should be seen by a larger audience. It won several awards — most recently honours at The Stage newspaper’s The Stage Awards (for which I was a juror).

New star Teddie’s pet just loves to hog the limelight!

Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen has plenty to keep her occupied during the lockdown. There are her Spanish, French and Italian lessons; books to read; a trampoline to bounce on; Joe Wicks exercises on You Tube every morning ‘with yoga mats on the floor’; and feeding the pet pig.

‘Feed the pig!’ I exclaimed when I asked the 13-year-old (14 next week) star of Sky Cinema’s Four Kids And It whether she had any pets.

‘I have a pig called Harrison. He’s massive,’ she said. ‘If I’m 5ft 3in, he’d probably be three quarters the size of me.’

The eight-year-old Kunekune domestic pig has a taste for banana peel and pig nuts, though Harrison (named after a young friend) is not very particular about what he eats.

Once, when Teddie-Rose was out with her parents — the actors Tamzin Malleson (pathologist Kate Wilding in Midsomer Murders and Dr Kate Brady on Always And Everyone) and Keith Allen (Trainspotting and many other movies) — Harrison got into the family’s South Cotswolds farmhouse, which was being painted.

‘He’s very destructive, so he can’t come in,’ Teddie-Rose prefaced before explaining further: ‘We came back and he had a half-eaten bar of soap in his mouth.’

She joked that he might have been trying to wash his hands.

‘He was covered in acrylic paint, so he was white for a few days,’ she said.

Harrison, besides being very large, has tusks that need to be removed every now and then.

Teddie-Rose also has two cats, Toffee and Ninja — but she herself prefers to be called just Teddie. ‘No one ever calls me Teddie-Rose,’ she said, ‘unless Mum’s mad at me.’

Teddie, who also appeared in the BBC TV film Cider With Rosie and the movie of Swallows And Amazons, filmed Four Kids And It, Sky Cinema’s splendid film adaptation of Jacqueline Wilson’s best-selling book, on location in Ireland, which was standing in for Cornwall.

The story, based on an original 1902 book by E. Nesbit, is about four children, played by Teddie, Billy Jenkins, Ashley Aufderheide and Ellie-Mae Siame, who discover a magical ‘sand-sprite’ (voiced by Michael Caine) that can grant wishes. Matthew Goode and Paula Patton play the parents of the disparate offspring, and Russell Brand is the greedy local landowner.

‘We were all very close on set,’ Teddie said of her young co-stars. They enjoyed spending time together when they weren’t filming, though it was disconcerting for them to be hanging out as a group one minute and the next be told: ‘OK, you need to be in a fight now — pretend to hate each other.’

The film, available on Sky Cinema from today, is an enjoyable family romp with special effects including flying children. ‘It was terrifying but really fun flying,’ Teddie told me.

One highlight during the shoot was a surprise, courtesy of the film’s baddie, Brand.

‘He brought an ice-cream truck on set,’ Teddie exclaimed. ‘He actually drove the truck himself, with jingles going very loudly. It was a hot day, so it was needed,’ she said.

What did Brand serve her? ‘A 99 cone with a flake.’

In recent days, her mother has been home-schooling her and she is wired into apps that her school has set up. ‘I pretty much end up speaking Spanish to myself,’ she said.

She loves reading and admits she was ‘obsessed’ with the Harry Potter books, which she read when she was seven: ‘My mum had to lock them away so I could read other stuff.’

Next week Teddie will have her 14th birthday, celebrating remotely with her friends. ‘We can have multiple people Face-Timing so I’ll probably speak to my friends for a few hours.’

Teddie asks her mother if there will be a cake and candles in the background.

‘Of course!’ Tamzin Malleson cried out gleefully.

And there’s not much clearing up after a virtual party. Unless Harrison invites himself in, that is. 

Actors Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis joined forces with Leon and several other restaurant chains to launch the #FeedNHS push, and by Monday 250 hot meals had been delivered to hospital staff in London.

On Wednesday that had risen to 1,000 meals; today it’s 6,000. The couple, self-isolating in Suffolk with their two children, have been on the phone 24/7. ‘A lot of it is just connecting people,’ McCrory told me.

Now they have set up a website — www.feednhs — ‘as a forum for the NHS and restaurants to get in touch with each other. We want it to inspire people to do the same in their areas’.

Watch out for…

Merritt Wever and Domhnall Gleeson star in the sublimely droll new HBO American TV comedy Run, written by Vicky Jones, who was a force behind Fleabag and Killing Eve and directed the stage version of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comic creation.

Those credentials may give you an inkling of the dark wit baked into this tale of two ex-lovers who made a pact, back in their university days, to run away together if either of them sent a text with the code word Run.

Trouble is, Gleeson’s character sent the emergency message to Wever by mistake. The antics that follow are outrageously wicked.

Wever has the comical grace notes of Judy Holliday and Judi Dench (circa As Time Goes By) combined with an adrenaline-laced injection of Waller-Bridge’s irreverent humour (she, by the way, makes an appearance in two episodes).

Eagle-eyed film-watchers will remember Wever’s great turn as Cassie, Scarlett Johansson’s sister, in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story , which can be found on Netflix. She also made her mark, with Toni Collette and Kaitlyn Dever, as a detective in the drama Unbelievable.

Run broadcasts on Sky Comedy from April 15.