BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Oscar star Alicia dives back into work after Best Supporting Actress win

Alicia Vikander is not wasting any time in getting back to work after her win at the Oscars for her luminous performance in The Danish Girl.

The actress flew from Los Angeles to Europe yesterday to begin a crash course in oceanography and learn how to handle a deep-sea submersible.

She will play a marine expert and biomathematician in a film based on J.M. Ledgard’s 2011 novel Submergence.

Alicia Vikander, pictured left, and James McAvoy will star in the film adaptation of 2011 novel Submergence

Alicia, a Swede who lives in North-West London, told me that the film is a ‘long distance love story’ about a marine biologist who has a four-day romance with a man she meets at a French hotel over the Christmas holidays.

The man, James More (to be played by James McAvoy) is later held captive by Al Qaeda jihadi fighters in Somalia, while Alicia’s character, Danielle Flinders, takes a voyage to the deepest depths of the ocean to explore an abyss off the coast of Greenland.

Wim Wenders will direct the film at locations in Germany, the UK and elsewhere.

Alicia, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Danish Girl, also stars in the new Jason Bourne film, which will be released over the summer.

I was amused to read some commentators who declared that Alicia had emerged out of nowhere to win her statuette.

Well, I’ve been writing about her for five years — and she’s one of the hardest-working thespians I know.

From X-Men to the Prince of Denmark

The new X-Men movie has inspired Oscar Isaac to play Hamlet on stage.

Isaac, who played dashing pilot Poe Dameron in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and the villainous title character in forthcoming X-Men: Apocalypse, will take on the role of the Danish prince in New York next year.

The actor (above right) studied at the Juilliard School for the performing arts in New York and is well versed in classical and modern theatre.

Oscar Isaac, pictured, says the new X-Men movie has inspired him to play Hamlet in New York next year

Isaac will play the titular villain in X Men: Apocalypse, pictured, and was also in the most recent Star Wars film

He will work with director Sam Gold in a production of Hamlet at the Theatre For A New Audience in Brooklyn, and the play will run from the spring of 2017. He’s currently in London, though, filming Star Wars: Episode VIII. 

In the X-Men film, Isaac plays the powerful ancient mutant En Sabah Nur — aka Apocalypse. The actor described him as ‘the most destructive force on the earth’.

Interestingly, a recent promotional photograph for the film shows Apocalypse holding a skull in a pose reminiscent of Shakespeare’s grave-digger scene with poor old Yorick in Hamlet (above left).

Bruce Cohen, spokesman for The Theatre For A New Audience said he had ‘no information’ about the production. He suggested that I wait for the theatre’s new season announcement . . .

Frasier gets his West End debut 

Cheers! — Frasier star Kelsey Grammer will join singer Alfie Boe in the London production of the Peter Pan musical Finding Neverland.

Grammer played the dual role of U.S. producer Charles Frohman and Captain Hook in the Broadway production.

The musical, inspired by how J.M.Barrie created the story of Peter Pan, had its world premiere in Leicester — but was given a major overhaul before it opened in New York.

Grammar is best known as Dr Frasier Crane in the TV show Cheers and as the star of its hugely successful spin-off, Frasier.

At a pre-Oscar party hosted by Harvey Weinstein, who also happens to be the producer of Finding Neverland, Grammer told me: ‘I’ll be coming to London with Neverland. It will be my debut over there.’

Kelsey Grammer, pictured with wife Kayte Walsh, will make his West End debut in Finding Neverland

The show, which now features a book by playwright James Graham, with music and lyrics by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy, has been playing on Broadway for a year — I’m a fan of the Barlow-Kennedy score.

Plus, negotiations are going on now for the show to open in London early next year.

There are rumours about Finding Neverland going to the New London, the Palladium and a couple of other venues, but nothing has been settled yet. 

The musical will undergo important changes for London involving running time, re-writing, re-orchestration and song placement.

Laura Michelle Kelly has been the show’s constant, playing the mother of the boys who inspired Barrie. But she’s likely to remain with the show in New York with someone else taking the role over here.

Barlow also has another show on the go — The Girls, a musical version of the 2003 film Calendar Girls, which has played to huge houses and success in Leeds and Salford. That, too, will run in the West End as soon as a theatre can be found.

Watch out for...

• Nate Parker who stars in highly anticipated drama The Birth Of A Nation. The movie, about a slave revolution in Virginia in 1831, opens later in the year but already it’s being discussed as one of the main features of the next awards season. 

I bumped into Parker, who also wrote, directed and produced the film, and he told me that he’s going to spend the next nine months ensuring that the film receives the widest possible global release — and the most attention. 

I last saw Parker in a fab movie, Beyond The Lights with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Minnie Driver and I know for sure that its distribution in the UK was a woeful disgrace, so I applaud Parker’s determination to see that The Birth Of A Nation gets seen in cinemas.

• Anna-Jane Casey, who will portray frontierswoman Annie Oakley in the classic Irving Berlin Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, from December 8 until January 14. 

Miss Casey — who knows how to shoot a partridge with a single cartridge — will be directed by Paul Foster in the show, which will be choreographed by Alistair David. 

The Sheffield show will use the revised book that Peter Stone wrote for the politically correct Broadway revival in 1999. I remember seeing that production — and it was very lively.

• Dan Gillespie Sells, the lead singer with The Feeling, who has written a new musical, a coming-of-age story, with Tom MacRae, which is based on a tale by Jonathan Butterell called Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. 

Butterell will direct the show, which (like Annie Get Your Gun) is being staged at the Crucible, Sheffield. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie will run from February 8, 2017.

• Laura Benanti, Zachary Levi, Gavin Creel and Jane Krakowski, who are utterly delightful in the charming revival of the musical She Loves Me, by Joe Masteroff, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick at the Roundabout Theatre’s Studio 54 auditorium. 

The show’s about colleagues (Benanti and Levi) at a parfumerie in old Hungary who loathe each other — but are unaware that they’re love-letter pen pals. 

Musicals of this type only work when they are cast with top-of-the-line actors, and those in this company, as directed by Scott Ellis, are some of Broadway’s finest. 

They’re fun to watch in this sumptuous, escapist production. It’s heaven ‘scent’!