In other cast news, Joanna Riding’s been announced for new musical Lend Me A Tenor at the Gielgud Theatre. She’s currently at the same venue in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I wonder if she can keep the same dressing room?!

There’s more news for musicals fans (hurrah!):

• A stage adaptation of Top Hat starring Tom Chambers and Summer Strallen (in the roles made famous by tap-dancing king and queen Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) is coming to the West End in spring 2012, following a UK tour.
• Road Show, the latest musical by Stephen Sondheim, will get a UK premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory this summer, with a cast led by David Bedella.
• Musical comedy Betwixt! comes to the Trafalgar Studios from July, bringing a bizarre mix of music, writer’s block, disembodied heads, sex-crazed nymphs and hunchbacks to the venue.

On a more serious note, there’ll be yet another King Lear in the capital next year. This time, the venue’s the Almeida Theatre, Michael Attenborough’s directing and Jonathan Pryce is the ageing monarch.

Finally, the transformed Cottesloe theatre is hosting four new plays by four playwrights new to the National this summer:

• Sam Holcroft’s Edgar And Annabel features a young married couple in a world of freedom fighters and a police state in crisis
• The Swan by DC Moore follows a family preparing for a wake in a South London pub
• Prasanna Puwanarajah’s Nightwatchman challenges ideas of politics, sport and national pride through the story of a female cricketer preparing to make her England debut
• Tom Basden’s black comedy There Is A War is set in a land ravaged by an ever-raging civil war

The plays will be performed as two double bills from 8 July until 30 August.