Having a blast!

Catherine Tate stars in A-bomb musical

Catherine Tate is to star in a new comic musical, set in America’s atomic age.

Miss Atomic Bomb is described as a romance and a coming-of-age story set in 1952 Las Vegas, where A-bomb tests were an unlikely tourist attraction

Tate plays Myrna – a fashionista who is designing clothes for pigs and who is the best friend of central character Candy, a farm girl whose sheep have mysteriously died.

The musical reunites Tate with West End star Simon Lipkin, with whom she starred in Sondheim’s Assassins at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

Co-writer Adam Long said: ‘Miss Atomic Bomb is set in 1952 in and around Las Vegas. The US military was carrying out above-ground atomic tests then, so from the swimming pools in Las Vegas you could see atoms mobs exploding – and that was turned into a tourist attraction.

‘Las Vegas was rebranded Atomic City, USA, and women got mushroom cloud hairdos, and they served atomic cocktails and people used to go out to the test sites and have picnics and watch the bombs go off.

‘And they would crown beautiful young women Miss Atomic Bomb and pose them in front of the mushroom clouds, so that’s where our show is set. It’s a love story about a girl who livs down wind of the bomb sites.

The cast also includes Florence Andrews, Dean John-Wilson, the star of Disney’s forthcoming Aladdin musical, and Daniel Boys.

Miss Atomic Bomb opens at the St James Theatre stage on March 7, where it is scheduled to run for a month.

Published: 18 Jan 2016