There have been a lot — and I mean a lot — of famous movies made into Broadway musicals over the years, and their success rate has not been particularly great. For every hit like Lion King or Hairspray, the Great White Way is littered with the corpses of failures like Saturday Night Fever, Shrek, and maybe most famously, Stephen King’s Carrie. (Which, by the way, is no where near as bad as people claim).
Now, one of the least likely movies to ever get a stage adaptation is going to be getting one as well, as we’ve just learned, via Entertainment Weekly, that King Kong is coming to the Broadway stage as a musical.
King Kong is stet to debut on Broadway in the fall of 2018, at the Broadway Theatre, in a show written by author Jack Thorne, who has brought other well known film properties to the stage before, as he wrote both Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is also coming to Broadway in 2018, as well as the recent critically acclaimed stage version of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In.
King Kong will be directed and choreographed by Drew McOnie (Strictly Ballroom The Musical), and scored and composed by Grammy nominee Marius de Vries, who himself has some experience in the world of film, having worked on movie musicals like La La Land and Moulin Rouge. Eddie Perfect (Beetlejuice) will write songs. And as for King Kong, the big guy will be designed by Sonny Tilders, using animatronics and puppetry.
The show’s producer Roy Furman said in a statement “King Kong is a quintessential New York story, and I’m proud to be involved in this historic production. Our team is creating a theatrical experience that we hope will astound audiences while delighting them with its heartfelt storytelling.”
Regardless of quality, this is the kind of show that casual New York tourist audiences love to see, but critics love to hate. And judging from the need for animatronics and puppetry, this could be the next Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark — a big, unwieldy, effects heavy show that has to keep the house full every single night simply to pay for itself. Nevertheless, if they pull it off it could be something that has never been seen before on Broadway. Our fingers are crossed for the Big Guy. May he bring some of his recent Kong: Skull Island mojo with him to the stage.
What do you think of a King Kong musical? Would you make the trek out to New York city to see the ol’ gorilla? Let us know your thoughts down below in the comments.
Images: Warner Brothers / Paramount Pictures
