Broadway Legends on the Show That Got Away

ABLUpdated 1 week Ago1 Mins read3

Snap out of it! In the green room of the New York “Legends of Broadway” shoot, Idina Menzel revealed that she’d been in a workshop of a musical adaptation of the 1987 movie Moonstruck with an “Italian, operatic score.” She’d tried to keep the show going but ultimately aged out of playing Loretta, the role that won Cher an Academy Award. If Idina can’t play the role now (she could), maybe young Cher Micaela Diamond could take the mantle? This did leave us wondering which crooner was doing the Nicolas Cage role: maybe Menzel’s former onstage lover Norbert Leo Butz? The adaptation is now underway as an opera at the Met, also written by John Patrick Shanley.

Her fellow legends have their own shows that got away. In other JPS news, Lin-Manuel Miranda shared with us that he was once in a “magical” reading of a new play by the Pulitzer Prize winner directed by Mike Nichols alongside Don Cheadle and Michael Shannon. Trump’s favorite singer Betty Buckley shared that she tried to mount a Cirque du Soleil–inspired production of Annie Get Your Gun. “I’m a real cowgirl, I ride horses, I live in Texas on the ranch,” Buckley said, “and I always thought I should play Annie Oakley.” Buckley says she pitched it to a producer at the time, but “they didn’t quite get it.” Maybe the “stadium version” of the wild-west show would be a good fit for the new artistic vision at the Kennedy Center.

Lea Salonga also told us about a Sliding Doors workshop with fellow Disney princess Judy Kuhn, with a book by John Weidman, but she had to drop out because she contracted COVID. Bebe Neuwirth shared that she was in several workshops of a show called Kicks, with an “exquisite” score by frequent Disney-princess composer Alan Menken, that never made it to Broadway. Producers, are you listening? We’ve got your next big gem hiding in the green room of our “Yesteryear” issue.