As his new show, Hairspray, leads the return to theatres, the singer talks about his mental health struggles, going back to his mining-town roots – and how the government has let down the performing arts
It is only an hour and a half before curtain-up, and if Michael Ball is feeling a rising panic at the idea of spending this time speaking to me through his iPad, rather than on his usual warmup, he is hiding it well. A trouper. It will be only the second performance of Hairspray, in which Ball plays the matriarch Edna Turnblad, and he is still on a high from opening night. “It was one of the most extraordinary nights I’ve ever had in the theatre,” he says. Despite an audience of only 1,000 – fewer than half the London Coliseum’s capacity – “they did twice the work,” Ball says. “I’ve never heard an ovation like it for the cast. They were up, and there was cheering and screaming. It’s just electric, and we needed to hear it. It’s been a long time.”
The culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, was there; he was photographed with Ball – who was, in Edna’s pearls, handbag and wig, almost Thatcherite – looking delighted. “I had a nice chat with him,” says Ball, with a theatrical grimace. Theatres, and the whole ecosystem around them, have been devastated by the pandemic. “And so we’ve got to say our piece, and the most important thing I said for us would be Covid insurance for producers,” says Ball. “It’s all very well opening theatres, but if there’s nothing to put into them, what’s the point? Producers need to have confidence that they can put productions together knowing that, if they have to be cancelled, they’re covered. I was banging the gong, in a frock, so I don’t think he knew quite what hit him. But he listened.”
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