Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Thriller on Broadway.... the horror, the horror!

I'm still processing the idea that James L. Nederlander, of the powerful Nederlander Producing Group of America, has bought the rights to make a Broadway musical out of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." Or more to the point, I suspect, to build a Broadway musical around John Landis' nine-minute zombie-dance video (Landis, by the way, just filed suit against Jackson, so that could be sticky).

Nederlander seems to envision the overarching plot as a variation on "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl," except that here it would be "girl meets boy, they fall in love, boy has big secret, now what?"

Now what, indeed. Is his big secret that he's a werewolf, as the video implies (via Jackson's now sublimely creepy line, "I'm not like other boys"), or a zombie?

Maybe they could get some kind of work release deal for these Filipino prison inmates.

2 comments:

RC said...

woa, that's crazy...

i can't imagine how they'd stretch out a song into a full length musical.

would they do three minutes of a stage version of the song, take an intermission, and then finish the song???

miss flickchick said...

The idea seems to be to use songs from both the "Thriller" and "Off the Wall" albums.

But let's face it: "Thriller," the song, and the dancing zombies have to be the centerpiece. I mean, "Thriller" was the best-selling album in history, and I bet you couldn't name one other song on it without peeking.

I couldn't.