Coming Soon: a Broadway show about Magic Johnson & Larry Bird

Last year, HBO ran a documentary called Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals (I think they meant “courtship” as a basketball pun, not to imply that the two were dating, but I’m honestly not sure which would be gayer).  Someone in the theater community apparently saw this and thought, “Hey, Magic had AIDS, maybe this could be a play!”  You can never have too many AIDS musicals, I always say.

A play about the relationship between basketball Hall of Fame members Magic Johnson and Larry Bird is being created for Broadway.
“Magic/Bird” is being developed by the producers and writer of the current Broadway show “Lombardi,” and is scheduled to debut in 2012, according to a news release.
The play “chronicles the intertwined life stories” of the two men, according to the release. It is being produced by Fran Kirmser and Tony Ponturo and written by Eric Simonson, who held the same roles in the making of “Lombardi.”
“Lombardi,” a one-act drama that opened in 2010 about the life of Hall of Fame football coach Vince Lombardi, is the only new play from the first half of the 2010-11 Broadway season that’s still running.
With the National Football League also credited as a “Lombardi” producer, it was staged with an investment of just over $3 million. Ponturo and Kirmser met on the producing team of the 2009 revival of the musical “Hair.” “Magic/Bird” is being produced in association with the NBA as well as Johnson, 51, and Bird, 54. [Bloomberg via Drew]

I’m gonna go ahead and guess that a Broadway show about Magic Johnson and Larry Bird might look a liiiiittle something like this:

I hear five minutes after they put out a casting call, Nic Cage burst in the door wearing a leather trenchcoat.  “Did somebody say something about magic birds?”

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