La La Land Stage Musical Adds Choreographer and Designers
La La Land is dancing its way toward Broadway.
Producers Lionsgate and Marc Platt announced four additions to the creative team for the stage musical adaptation: choreographer Mandy Moore, costume designer Mary Zophres and production designer 59 Studio, with Edward Pierce joining as design collaborator. Deadline The announcement fills key movement and design jobs, the roles that decide how a show looks and moves onstage.
On Broadway, producers are the people who raise the money and hire the team. Here, a Hollywood studio and a veteran Broadway producer are building that team together.
Moore is a three-time Emmy winner. As choreographer, she will create the dances and shape how the cast moves. It is a central job for a dance-heavy story about an actress and a jazz musician chasing work in Los Angeles.
Zophres is a four-time Oscar nominee, most recently for Babylon. She knows this material well. She designed the costumes for the La La Land film, including the dresses worn by star Emma Stone, according to earlier reporting from Variety. Onstage, the costume designer dresses every performer, from leads to ensemble.
59 Studio will lead production design, meaning the physical world of the show, from sets to video and effects. The studio has won a Tony Award, Broadway's top honor, and created visual effects for Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Pierce will work alongside the studio as design collaborator, sharing design duties.
They join a team already in place. Director Bartlett Sher leads the production and guides acting, staging and storytelling. The book, meaning the spoken story and dialogue around the songs, comes from Ayad Akhtar and Matthew Decker. The songs reunite composer Justin Hurwitz with lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who wrote the film's music.
For fans, this means the stage version is keeping close ties to the film while staffing up with theater hands. Hurwitz, Pasek and Paul wrote the movie score. Sher, Zophres and the rest bring long stage credits to translate it for a live house.
No casting, theater or dates have been set. The producers said that information will be announced in the coming months. That is the practical detail ticket buyers wait for, since the theater fixes the size of the house, the ticket prices and the start of sales.
Lionsgate lists the project as a future Broadway musical and has described it as a stage spectacular for New York City. Broadway means eight performances a week in a New York theater with 500 seats or more, with investor money behind it.
