The next movie to be turned into a Broadway musical—after a season that featured such rousing successes as the Rocky musical and Bridges Of Madison County—will be 1973’s Best Picture winner, The Sting, as per Deadline. The film, directed by George Roy Hill, featured the director’s second team-up with Paul Newman and Robert Redford (after Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid) and is one of the most purely fun movies to win Best Picture. It’s all an elaborate con artist game, with fun reveals and the sheer enjoyment of watching Newman and Redford play off of each other. Also, it’s got a score featuring the music of Scott Joplin. God willing, the people making this new musical won’t try to turn “The Entertainer” into a song in the show by making up lyrics for it.
Though if they did, it might not turn out so bad, because this musical has attracted a great team of people who’ve been responsible for some of the better stage shows of the past 15 years. Writing the book will be Bob Martin, who won the Tony for his work on The Drowsy Chaperone and was also one of the co-creators of Slings And Arrows, which we are contractually obligated to mention as often as possible. The score will be handled by Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann, who were responsible for the winning, funny Urinetown: The Musical (for which they also received Tonys). It’s not immediately clear if Martin will be bringing the fourth-wall-breaking shtick from Drowsy to The Sting, or if Kotis and Hollmann will be composing all of its music in a neo-Brechtian fugue state, but this article let us use the term “neo-Brechtian,” so all is well. Please commence with discussing all of the movies that should be turned into musicals before this one, as well as grousing about how there are no original ideas anymore.