The producers of the brand-new musical Here & Now, presented by UK pop sensation Steps, have announced that West End actress Lara Denning will star in the role of Caz for the show’s Southampton dates.
Welcome to seaside superstore Better Best Bargains, where it’s Friday night, the vibe is right, and everyone’s dancing in the aisles. But when Caz discovers the shelves are stocked with lies and betrayal, the summer of love she and her friends dreamed of suddenly feels like a tragedy.
Have they all lost their chance of a ‘happy ever after’? Or does love have other plans in store?
Featuring Steps’ most beloved hit songs, Here & Now has an original book by Shaun Kitchener and is produced by the band and ROYO with Pete Waterman. It is directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, with choreography by Olivier Award-winning Matt Cole and Matt Spencer-Smith as musical supervisor, orchestrator and arranger.
Lara Denning recently finished playing Anne Hathaway in the UK and Ireland tour of& Juliet. Her other theatre credits include Sunset Boulevard , Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ , Matilda, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Eugenius!, Carousel, Scrooge The Musical, The Rocky Horror Show, Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance, All the Fun of the Fair, and Dirty Dancing in Concert.
The cast of Here & Now includes Lara Denning as Caz, Jacqui Dubois as Vel, Blake Patrick Anderson as Robbie, Rosie Singha as Neeta, River Medway as Jem, Chris Grahamson as Gareth, Edward Baker-Duly as Max, Ben Darcy as Ben, John Stacey as Lesley, and Lauren Woolf as Tracey.
Also in the cast are Georgia Christofi, Kade Ferraiolo, Albert Green, Harry Jack, Casey Jay, Charlie-Jay Johnson, Rosemary Annabella Nkrumah, Dean Rickards, Markus Södergren, Genevieve Taylor and Jessica Vaux.
Casting for Patricia for Southampton will be announced in due course.
Steps (Claire Richards, Faye Tozer, Ian ‘H’ Watkins, Lee Latchford-Evans and Lisa Scott-Lee) are the UK’s most successful mixed sex pop group of all time, with 14 top five singles, four number one albums, 22 million record sales, 500 million streams, and 11 sold-out national arena tours under their belts. The band’s hits include Tragedy/Heartbeat and Stomp.
Steps’ 2017 comeback tour sold out all 300,000 tickets, making it one of the biggest pop tours of the year. The band have since continued to release new music. In 2022, Steps celebrated their 25th anniversary with a headline summer tour and released the number one album, Platinum Collection, which means they join ABBA, Rolling Stones and Stereophonics as the only groups in UK history to score number one albums in four consecutive decades.
Tickets for Here & Now: The Steps Musical (Tuesday 20 – Saturday 24 January 2026) are on sale at mayflower.org.uk or 02380 711811.
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