NEW YORK — Savion Glover will be in the director’s seat for his next big Broadway production.
The Tony Award-winning star of “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk” and “Jelly’s Last Jam” has been tapped to co-direct a Broadway revival of the classic Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and John O’Hara musical “Pal Joey” next year.
“Scandal” actor Tony Goldwyn, who most recently starred in Mathew Lopez’s Tony Award-winning play “The Inheritance,” will also co-direct the production, featuring a new book by Academy Award nominee Richard LaGravenese.
Producers announced Monday that the new adaptation of O’Hara’s story will be changed so that the primary setting of the plot is a South Side Chicago nightclub in the 1940s and the character of Linda will not be a stenographer/clerk but an aspiring singer. The creative team has been granted permission from the Rodgers and Hart estate to interpolate some of that team’s famous standards into the score.
Additions to the score already highlighted by “Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book” will include “The Lady is a Tramp” “My Heart Stood Still” and “Falling in Love With Love” among others.
Glover, who last worked on Broadway in George Wolfe’s star-studded 2016 epic “Shuffle Along, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” will also choreograph the re-imagined production.
The creative team for “Pal Joey” also includes set designer Derek McLane, costume designer Emilio Sosa and orchestrator-arranger-music supervisor Daryl Waters.
Gene Kelly and Vivienne Segal starred in the original 1940 musical revolving around a womanizing heel whose ambitions lead him into an affair with the wealthy, middle-aged married woman.
More notably, the 1957 film version loosely adapted from the musical starred Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak.
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