Michael Ball will headline a new Christmas Musical Spectacular at Manchester’s AO Arena across two nights in December, in a festive live show that brings together some of the biggest names in musical theatre and popular performance. The production is set for Tuesday December 22 and Wednesday December 23 in Manchester city centre.
The show will be hosted by TV star Aled Jones and will also feature Keala Settle, Loren Allred, Ben Forster, Kerry Ellis, Alice Fearn, Kelly Mathieson and Hugh Maynard. It will be accompanied by the Manchester Camerata, Manchester Vocal Ensemble and Cardwell Theatre School, with Isaac McCullough conducting. Seated tickets will start from £40, while premium VIP packages will be available from £130.
Anthony Prophet said the aim was to create something that would stop people in their tracks as soon as they entered the arena, and said Ball would be leading a cast of performers that he described as especially strong for Manchester. He added that live music at Christmas carries a particular force because the songs become part of people’s lives, memories and families over generations, and said the team wanted to build that feeling into an experience on the biggest possible scale.
Tickets go on sale on Friday, May 15, and will be available from the Christmas Musical Spectacular website and from the AO Arena. Every ticket sold will include a £1 charitable contribution to Forever Manchester, which Prophet said the organisers were proud to support through the event. The production is being described as one of the UK’s biggest new festive live productions and is being created by the Greater Manchester team behind the Britfest Festival in Hale.
Organisers say the arena will be transformed into a world of music, light, celebration and Christmas magic, with orchestral arrangements, Christmas favourites, visuals, cinematic staging and arena-wide production effects. For Manchester audiences, the attraction is not just the cast or the scale but the timing: the show lands in the final days before Christmas, when the city’s festive calendar is at its busiest and demand for a large-scale seasonal event is likely to be at its peak. That makes the December dates and the first day of ticket sales on May 15 the key moments for anyone hoping to get in early.
