Variety is reporting that Disney has started testing the waters for a live stage Muppet stage production in New York City. It’s a development Muppet fans first started rumbling about a while back, when Disney registered some relevant domain names. Oddly, the Variety article reports the whole thing using plain English, rather than Variety-type language like “Mupps aud for big board suits in the App” or whatever.
From the article:
The brief showcase, staged May 31 at Disney’s New Amsterdam Theater for a group of DTP staffers and a handful of others connected to the potential project, incorporated a handful of sets and more than 85 Muppets in an experiment intended to reveal whether it would even be feasible to present the Muppets in a live theatrical context, juggling puppetry needs with audience sightlines and all the other physical demands of legit theater.
The presentation, directed by prolific Broadway guy Alex Timbers, “seemed to go well,” but it sounds like it might be just one of many Disney properties up for translation to the stage, and I don’t know if Broadway is big enough for all of them. But we’ll all cross our fingers and hope they make it… It was an unrealized dream of Jim Henson’s to have the Muppets star in a major stage production, and an evening at a live Muppet show could make for the perfect companion piece to the future Jim Henson museum gallery for a Muppet fan visiting NYC.
Thanks to Tough Pigs pal Ryan Mead for the alert! Click here to ask Broadway of what city on the Tough Pigs forum!
by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com
