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.

First up this week, congratulations to Clybourne Park, which has won another award! As well as winning Best New Play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, the Critics Circle Theatre Awards, the South Bank Sky Arts Theatre Award and the Olivier Awards, playwright Bruce Norris has now won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which includes a cool $10,000 reward. It’s a great show, and is booking until 7 May if you fancy seeing a winner!

There’s lots of casting news around this week:

• Samantha Womack (best known for playing Ronnie Mitchell in EastEnders) will play lead role Nellie Forbush when the Tony Award-winning Lincoln Center Theater production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific comes to the Barbican this summer
• Andrew Buchan (who you’ll recognise from TV’s Garrow’s Law) is going to play Bolingbroke opposite Eddie Redmayne’s Richard II at the Donmar in December
• Star Wars actor Denis Lawson is heading back to the Royal Court for the first time in 20 years ain Anya Reiss’s drama The Acid Test, which starts next month
• And Haydn Gwynne, Chuk Iwuji and Gemma Jones (from Spooks!) are to appear alongside Kevin Spacey in Richard III, the final instalment of Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project, which plays at the Old Vic from 29 June

Finally, news of a new musical coming to London: Lend Me A Tenor opens at the Gielgud theatre in June. It’s the story of the failing Grand Opera Company of Ohio in 1934, which is about to be saved by the arrival of the world’s greatest tenor, Tito Merelli. When he’s unexpectedly incapacitated, the meek director’s assistant has to find a replacement. Add a scheming soprano, a tenor-struck ingénue, a jealous wife and the Cleveland Police department, and you’ve got the makings of a fab new musical comedy on the West End.