Canadian duo Neil Bartram and Brian Hill's new musical based on the Timothy Findley novel Not Wanted On the Voyage will set sail this summer in Evanston, Illinois.
Billed as a "darkly funny, modern re-imagining of the Great Flood", the show was workshopped at Northwestern University this winter and will debut as part of the school's American Music Theatre Project in July.
Amanda Denhert, who directed Cabaret at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2008, is helming the ship, while Fela! associate choreographer Maija Garcia will be responsible for all jazz hands on deck.
(From the sounds of things in the above YouTube preview, Bartram and Hill's musical will most likely not include the Sunday school classic Rise and Shine. You know, the one that goes: God said to Noah, there's gonna be a floody, floody....)
The Stratford Shakespeare Festival had an oar in Not Wanted on the Voyage earlier in its development, so perhaps if she turns out to be ship-shape, we might see a full production mounted there in the future... and then set sail for Broadway?
Well, maybe. Bartram and Hill's last musical, the more modest The Story of My Life, was not wanted on the Great White Way in 2009; it closed there after a handful of performances.
But then PS Classics released a cast recording and since then it's had a healthy life outside of New York, notably in Los Angeles where a recent run was extended. So by no means did Bartram and Hill's careers go down with that ship...
Paddling away from that eddy of bad nautical puns, Rufus Wainwright's music is being used as the basis for a jukebox musical in San Francisco.
The A.C.T. Young Conservatory is premiering Beautiful Child: The Music of Rufus Wainwright from May 14 to 29. It features a book written by Craig Slaight and direction by Domenique Lozano. And this is how the plot is described:
Shamed by his father's arrest during the Panic of 1893, young New York socialite Josiah Matliff flees to Chicago. As he traverses the American railways, he meets other teenage runaways from the fringes of society who are escaping their own pasts. Wainwright's haunting melodies and emotionally charged lyrics shape Beautiful Child into an original and unforgettable story of independence and awakening.
In previous years, the A.C.T.Y.C - mostly comprised of actors from a number of Bay Area high schools - has premiered shows based around the music of Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Lennon and McCartney, Sting, Elton John, Jacques Brel and Noël Coward.