Regina Spektor and Tina Landau Collaborating On Broadway Musical

Bear with me here. Me, and you, love Broadway Musical Theatre composer Richard Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame. You know, wrote the music to South Pacific and the Sound Of Music and and and…

His grandson Adam Guettel is a pretty gifted composer in his own write and if you have never heard his Myths and Hymns you should because it’s awesome. Anyway, I am pretty fanatical about Grandpa Rodgers so when I heard Adam was having his first musical produced back in 1996 at New York’s Playwrights Horizon I made sure to check it out.

And I was impressed… to a degree. It is the story of  a man stuck in a coal mine and it comes with its own set of limitations but having said that despite the complexity of the songs it was a moving experience and a fine first step. Tina Landau wrote the book for and directed it.

Now comes word she is working on a retelling of the Brother’s Grimm Sleeping Beauty  Broadway musical for the 2011-2012 season . According to Theatre News: “An expansion of Landau’s 2002 acclaimed one-act play produced by the La Jolla Playhouse, the musical uses the 1812 Grimm fairy tale Sleeping Beauty as a jumping-off point for a contemporary and hauntingly provocative story of beauty lost and beauty found.”

Landau is writing the book and directing, Michael Kordie is writing the lyric and Regina Spektor is composing the music. This makes perfect sense to me. Spektor is classically trained and has been playing with a string section since June. It sounds pretty fucking great to me.