I cover the film industry for a living, and as absurd as it is, it still doesn’t hold a candle to theater, where writing songs about a movie and hiring a washed-up sitcom star to play the lead are considered innovation. Case in point: Sylvester Stallone is teaming up with Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko, the two most boring heavyweight champions of all time, to produce a stage musical based on Rocky. Boxing and showtunes: two great tastes that taste great together. More than anything in the world, I want it to be true that Sly signed the contract with his fancy skull pen.

Stallone and the Klitschkos, who will produce Rocky: The Musical together with Kevin King Templeton of Stallone’s Rouge Marble shingle, announced the project in Hamburg on Monday.

“They kept jabbing me and jabbing me about it, and eventually I just got so bored that I agreed to everything they wanted.”

Stallone said in giving the pugilist classic the Andrew Lloyd Webber treatment he would be focusing on Rocky’s romantic side.
“At the end of the day, Rocky is a love story and he could never have reached the final bell without Adrian,” said Stallone. “To see this story coming to life on a musical stage makes me proud. And it would make Rocky proud.”

“At the end of the day, saying ‘at the end of the day’ doesn’t make the statement it prefaces any less ridiculous. A fictional character I created taught me that.”

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A while back, Dreamworks teamed up with a company called Global Creatures to produce a $20 million theatrical version of How to Train Your Dragon which is premiering this March. They recently invited press in for a preview, and holy crap this looks awesome. I’m generally against adapting movies into plays, since it’s kind of the least creative thing ever (what if we took Hairspray and Legally Blonde, subtracted the satire, and added gay songs and horrible cheesy theater smiles!). But you know what’ll always change my mind?  Giant, fire-breathing dragon puppets. Now that’s what I call theater! My God, I’d never have been so down on theater if I knew it could be so much like Truckosaurus.

And that dragon. He’s so soulful and expressive. I wonder if that’s Andy Serkis in there. I bet it is. He’s such an amazing actor.

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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?”

Relax, relax, Scarfield is fine. The actor in question was working on Julie Taymor’s $65 million Spider-Man play.  A 65-million-dollar play, mother of God.  It’s like a steam engine made of unobtainium.

The latest and most painful disaster involves actor Kevin Aubin, who broke both his wrists while demonstrating a botched flying stunt for a small audience last week. Aubin is okay, if in casts. He wrote on Facebook, “well i dont know what im allowed to say. but something went wrong and i fell on my hands from a high distance. It happens, no one to blame. I’m alive and ok.” On the brighter side, the show sounds pretty amazing: Aubin hurt himself while being catapulted, as if by a slingshot, across the stage. According to someone who has seen it, “They are not just flying people around — they’re catapulting them! It’s like they’re being shot out of rubber bands … There are going to be Spider-Men flying all over the theater — right over your head — during the show.” [Vulture]

He broke the wrists in “a fall?”  Uh-huh, riiight.  Sure, buddy, whatever you say.  Look, as soon as I heard U2 was writing songs for a musical about Spider-Man, I knew dismissive-wank-related accidents would be inevitable. Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s flooding.

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(Yeah, you gettin’ laid tonight, playa.”)

13-year-old Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin is set to play Helen Keller on Broadway next year.  She’ll star in the revival of William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker, a title sure to sound ironic to its subject if she were indeed able to recognize sounds.

“I am so honored,” the 13-year-old Breslin said in an interview. “It’s like the biggest thing in the world. … I have read the biography of Helen Keller. So I’ve always known the story, and it’s always been something I wanted to play.

“The Miracle Worker” was about three women — Helen, Annie Sullivan, the determined instructor who teaches the deaf and blind Helen how to communicate, and Helen’s mother (a role still be to cast), a woman who insisted against her husband’s advice of reaching out to this young teacher for her daughter. [THR]

Meanwhile, FilmDrunk was able to obtain an exclusive transcript of Breslin’s first big song and dance number in the show:

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