A Star Is Born Heading to Broadway

A long-gestating project has taken one step closer to becoming reality. Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures has announced that Academy Award-winning writer/director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters—Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published, 1998) will make his return to Broadway to direct the stage musical adaptation of the legendary George Cukor film, A Star Is Born. Condon has some notable experience with musicals, having written the screenplay for the Oscar-winning Chicago (2003) and directed the 2006 film adaptation of Dreamgirls. His Broadway debut came in 2014, with the revival of Side Show, a musical about Daisy and Violet Hilton, the popular vaudeville performers of the 1930s.

The 1954 movie, which starred the luminous Judy Garland as the aspiring singer Esther Blodgett, and James Mason as her husband, the fading movie star Norman Maine, featured seven songs from the pens of Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin (pictured left and center in a 1956 photograph taken in the Soviet Union during the worldwide tour of Porgy and Bess), including Garland’s tour-de-force “The Man That Got Away,” as well as “Someone at Last” and “It’s a New World.”

— Michael Owen