Lynn Nottage Will Pen Stage Musical Adaptation of Black Orpheus
(© David Gordon)
Pulitzer Prize-winning Lynn Nottage (Ruined) will write the book for the new stage musical adaptation of the 1959 Academy Award-winning film Black Orpheus, producers Stephen Byrd, Alia Jones-Harvey, and Paula Marie Black have announced. The Broadway-bound production, featuring tunes from the motion picture by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Luiz Bonfá, and Vinicius de Moraes, will be directed by Tony Award winner George C. Wolfe.
Inspired by Vinicius de Moraes' play Orfeu da Conceição, Black Orpheus sets the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice against the backdrop of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. The 1959 screen drama received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
No timeline or additional information about Black Orpheus on Broadway has yet been revealed. News about the production dates back to September 2012, when theater writers Charles Möeller and Claudio Botelho were announced to have been penning the show. "We intend to mix English and Portuguese along the lines of what the recent revival of West Side Story did by mixing English and Spanish," coproducer Jones-Harvey then told TheaterMania.
