Prolific director George C. Wolfe and Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage are on board with producers Stephen Byrd, Alia Jones-Harvey and Paula Marie Black to recast Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus as a Broadway musical.
The steamy 1960 Best Foreign Film Oscar winner, which set the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in modern-day Rio de Janeiro against the orgiastic background of carnavale, had a celebrated score by Luiz Bonfa and Antonio Carlos Jobim that’s widely credited with launching the Bossa Nova craze in the U.S. with such classics as its theme, “Manha de Carnaval.”
Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for the show, said that the producers had secured the rights to the film’s score. “There will be a composer as well,” he added. No other creatives or any casting was announced, and no time frame was given in the announcement, though an educated guess would put an actual opening at three seasons off. “Stephen will give George and Lynne the time they need to do their show,” Miramontez said.
Wolfe most recently directed Tom Hanks in Lucky Guy as well as the acclaimed revival of The Normal Heart and the Broadway production of Angels In America. His musicals include the Tony Kushner/Jeanine Tesori collaboration Caroline, Or Change and Bring In Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk.
Nottage won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Ruined, her searing play about sexual and political violence in Congo. Byrd has become a regular producer of Broadway revivals, most recently with last season’s Romeo And Juliet.
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