New casting alert for WICKED! There's a brand-new Boq in Oz in the new year. Welcome to Nicholas McLean. Do you know who else is in the current cast of this long-running blockbuster?
McLean, currently playing ‘Gary Coleman’ in the UK tour of Avenue Q, joins the cast from Monday 20 January 2020. He trained at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts and made his West End debut in The Book of Mormon.
Current Boq, Idriss Kargbo, plays the final performance of his limited return engagement on 9 November 2019, and is followed from Monday 11 November 2019 to Saturday 18 January 2020, by George Ure as Boq, a role he previously played in the West End and on the original UK & Ireland Tour.
Now in its landmark 14th year, WICKED has already been seen by 10 million people in London alone and is now the 9th longest-running West End musical of all time (and the 13th longest-running West End show of all time). Winner of over 100 major awards, including three Tony Awards on Broadway and two Olivier Awards and ten theatregoer-voted WhatsOnStage Awards (including three for ‘Best West End Show’) in the UK, the classic musical remains “one of the biggest hits of our age” (The Observer).
Based on the acclaimed, best-selling novel by Gregory Maguire, WICKED imagines an ingenious backstory and future possibilities to the lives of L. Frank Baum’s beloved characters from ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ and reveals the decisions and events that shape the destinies of two unlikely University friends on their journey to becoming Glinda The Good and the Wicked Witch of the West.
Also in the current cast of WICKED are Nikki Bentley (Elphaba), Helen Woolf (Glinda), Alistair Brammer (Fiyero), Kim Ismay (Madame Morrible), Andy Hockley (The Wizard), Simeon Truby (Doctor Dillamond), Natasha Ferguson* (Nessarose), Laura Pick (Standby for Elphaba) and Lisa-Anne Wood (Standby for Glinda). *Maternity cover for Carina Gillespie.
WICKED has music and lyrics by multi Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy Award winner Stephen Schwartz (Godspell; Disney’s Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Enchanted and, for DreamWorks Animation, The Prince of Egypt) and is based on the novel ‘Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West’ by Gregory Maguire and adapted for the stage by Winnie Holzman (My So-Called Life). Musical staging is by Tony Award-winner Wayne Cilento with direction by two-time Tony Award-winner Joe Mantello.
