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‘Groundhog Day’ is coming to Broadway

By Tony Tran

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The hit comedy Groundhog Day will be getting the stage treatment as it is being adapted into a musical.

In news about things that should have been a reality years ago, the classic comedy Groundhog Day will be adapted as a musical ready to hit Broadway.

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The musical will be based on the classic Bill Murray 1993 comedy about a news anchor cursed to relive a fateful Groundhog Day over and over and over and over and over … well, you get the picture. Since its release, it has gained the kind of fame and acclaim you can only hope from really good cult hits, and has even been selected by the National Film Registry for preservation.

If you have not seen it yet, it’s still on Netflix so go watch it. Like, now.

The musical will be written by the folks who produced the recent Matilda musical, with the music by Tim Minchin and book by Danny Rubin, who also helped co-write the original film with Harold Ramis. The musical will be directed by by Matthew Warchus, who won a Tony for Best Play Direction in 2009.

From the New York Post:

"Warchus staged a workshop a few weeks ago in London, planning to open there first. But the workshop went so well, the producers decided to head straight to Broadway. Previews are set to start Jan. 23, 2017, with a theater and cast yet to be determined.“Danny, Tim and I have been working on the show for three years in an informal way,” Warchus tells me. “We didn’t even have the rights from Sony. By the time we had a first draft and seven songs, we decided we’d better get them.”“I loved the film when it came out,” Warchus says. “And we realized that, in a musical, you can be more explicit about the metaphor of time running out, of feeling trapped, of not having enough time to become the best version of yourself. Sometimes we went a little too far in that direction and had to keep reminding ourselves to keep it light.”"

If it is as good as they are making it sound, let’s hope that the film will run for a while.

Well, not too long, though.

Though some may raise a snobby nose to the adaptation of a classic for the theater, I say that it’s a marked improvement over the alternative; having a gritty reboot of the film, or worse, a sequel that just would not be the same at all.

(h/t: The New York Post)

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