It has just been announced that a national tour of the musical Urban Cowboy will be launched in the fall of 2004.
Directed by Lonny Price, the Broadway production stars Matt Cavenaugh as a modern-day cowboy who must tackle a threatening mechanical bull to win the heart and the respect of the woman he loves (played by Jenn Colella). With a book by Aaron Latham and Philip Oesterman, the show features a number of songs written for the 1980 John Travolta-Debra Winger film upon which it is based, plus several new songs by Bob Stillman, Jeff Blumenkrantz, Jason Robert Brown, and others.
Urban Cowboy opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on March 27 to mostly negative reviews. The next day, it was announced that the show would close on Saturday the 29th after having played four performances; but, immediately following the supposedly final performance, director Price took the stage and told the audience that the producers had decided to continue the run.