X FACTOR: £6m It's Time Face The Music created by Harry Hill and Simon Cowell to open at the London Palladium

X FACTOR: £6m It's Time Face The Music created by Harry Hill and Simon Cowell to open at the London Palladium

By Baz Bamigboye

PUBLISHED: 19:29 EST, 14 March 2013 | UPDATED: 12:12 EST, 15 March 2013

The £6?million X Factor show It’s Time To Face The Musical! will open at the London Palladium this time next year.

After two workshops the show, officially titled X Factor â€" It’s Time To Face The Musical!, created by Harry Hill and Steve Brown, has been given the go-ahead by joint producers Stage Entertainment and Simon Cowell’s company, Syco Entertainment.

Casting will begin in May and rehearsals are set to start after Christmas.

‘It’s going to be quite a wacky big show,’ Rebecca Quigley, managing director of Stage Entertainment’s UK interests, told me.

The show must go on: X Factor ¿ It¿s Time To Face The Musical! has been given the go-ahead by Simon Cowell's company

Louis Walsh and Cowell are characters in the show â€" which will feature 19 new songs â€" along with ‘others you might recognise, but who have different names’ she said.

‘We learn why he wears his trousers high,’  Ms Quigley said, referring to one of Cowell’s  sartorial quirks. (After she explained why, my eyes watered.

There’s also a judge called Geordie, who’s a former pop singer from the North-East, and both Ms Quigley and Harry Hill agreed that she  combined elements of X Factor judges Cheryl Cole and Tulisa  Contostavlos. ‘I think Cheryl would laugh a lot at it, because it’s silly and fun,’ Hill said. 

He SAID he didn’t think Louis would be offended by his stage version, either. ‘In our show he’s basically dozed off; he’s an octogenarian boy-band manager.’

Cowell's character will have to have perma-tan said Harry Hill (right) who has helped to create the musical

The Cowell character, meanwhile, would have to have ‘a perma-tan’. ‘The thing about Simon is that he has this great, strong image,’ Hill said.

‘The show will at times be scathing, without being cynical.’

Although Cowell will feature in the musical, it’s not about him, it was stressed; and it’s not a spin-off from The X Factor, either. 

Quigley said she and her team were insistent it should be a proper musical in its own right. ‘We didn’t want to do something that just appealed to X Factor fans,’ she said.

The X Factor live every night: A new £6m musical which debut at the London Palladium Theatre in London

So, it’s a story about a teenage girl called Chenice, who lives in a caravan in London with her grandfather, who’s in an iron lung.

They know nothing about The X Factor, because the iron lung blocks ITV’s signals. 

There’s a young man called Max; and Chenice has a dog who comments directly to the audience, like a Greek chorus. Originally, he was called Topshop, but there was an objection and the mutt’s name was changed to Primark. Stop press: It’s now been changed again to Poundshop. 

‘I think he’s a pit-bull,’ Hill said.

Quigley said Cowell had not interfered one jot. ‘I’m sure he’s going to have an opinion,’ she said, referring to poster art work and marketing.

But she stressed that ‘as far as the creative process goes, he’s leaving it to the theatre people’.

Rebecca Quigley said the audience will discover why Simon Cowell wears his trousers so high

It’s a pretty classy creative team, too. Sean Foley will direct, with Kate Prince, who founded hip-hop dance company ZooNation, is doing choreography.

Es Devlin, who did the designs for the London Olympics closing ceremony, will design the sets; award-winning Hugh Vanstone will paint with light; with Gareth Owen and Phillip Bateman on sound design and music supervision, respectively.

Prince will hold an aerial dance workshop at studios in Bow, East London, in May.

Some who took part in the earlier workshops will be auditioned, including Alexander Hanson, who took the part of Cowell.

Stage version: Harry Hill said he did not think Louis Walsh would be offended by his character in the musical

However, he’s also in the running to portray Stephen Ward in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical about the osteopath at the centre of the Sixties Profumo scandal.

There’s a suggestion that show will be on the boards in  London by early next year, too.

But the focus for now is on who will play 18-year-old Chenice. ‘She’ll have to have a killer voice,’ Quigley stressed.

Hill said the show’s very different from the newly revamped Viva Forever at the Piccadilly.

The deal for the Palladium hasn’t been officially signed yet.

Tickets for the It's Time To Face The Musical can purchased here.

Some of our top young leading men are being assembled for a movie about an Oxbridge dining society not unlike the one David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson belonged to when they were at university.

Max Irons, Sam Claflin, Douglas Booth and Robert Pattinson are just four of the actors in various stages of negotiations to be in the film version of Laura Wade’s incendiary play Posh. Focusing on the fictional  Riot Club, it explored an elite, refined world of privilege.

Posh opened at the Royal Court three years ago and later enjoyed a West End run. The film version is being directed by Lone Scherfig, who made An Education â€" the picture which helped to make Carey Mulligan a star.

Talks: Max Irons and Robert Pattinson are in various stages of negotiations to be in the film version of Laura Wade’s incendiary play Posh

The story takes place in the private dining room of a pub, where Riot Club members meet for one of their notorious dinners.

They trash the joint, and things go more than wrong when someone hires a prostitute.

Up and coming star Sam Claflin

Wade has adapted her play for the screen, opening it out so we learn more about the background of the young Tories who run the club as if they were running the country. 

Scherfig, her casting director and producers from Blueprint, Film 4 and the BFI have discussed various actors they’d like to be involved.

They want Irons for a main part. He opens in a major film later this month called The Host. Claflin plays Finnick Odair in the next Hunger Games film Catching Fire. 

Booth is in the forthcoming Romeo And Juliet, and he was a fine Pip in the BBC’s TV version of Great Expectations.

Pattinson is in very early discussions only. At the moment, he’s filming David Michod’s Outback western The Rover in Adelaide.

But when he finishes next week, the  Posh script will be one of several he’ll be mulling over.

Part of the problem of assembling such a large ensemble â€" there are ten members of the Riot Club â€" is that at some point they all have to be seated around a table together; and getting schedules to match up is a complex undertaking.