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[Comedy] is about including the audience and making them part of the show, which is surely what theatre is all about. When you talk to an audience you have to eyeball someone about eight rows back, then that person starts smiling and the strange thing is that people around them start smiling as well and it radiates across the entire auditorium. You can't just talk to the ether. That's the great thing about comedy: wondering if you are going to pull it off tonight - are we going to be funny? 
Intro by Baz Bamigboye: In my view, he takes to the stage with such an easy grace, he could have been born doing it. He's not a singer, as such, but he knows how to put over a song. He would have been great in The Producers, but the producers of The Producers wouldn't take a gamble on him. They should have.
I thought, initially, "is it proper acting?" and all that. But I have to tell you, if you are not used to singing and you are waiting for that overture to start, your mouth feels like the Sahara Desert. It's bloody terrifying!
In conversation with Mariella Frostrup
Ed Hall brings the ideas of someone who has not much knowledge of musicals to a musical and that's actually very good, because he approaches it differently. He wants to make sense of the numbers, it's not just a question singing prettily, it's a question of actually getting the songs to *mean* something… and as a result of this the audience listen to the words and they laugh at the songs. So he's brought that freshness to it (…) It's a farce, you know, and with a farce you have to make sure that you know what's going on and if you don't then the audience will stop laughing. So he's brought that sort of classical approach to a classical comedy.
Listen to the full interview
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Listen to another short radio interview with Desmond Barrit (from Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4, July 2004)
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