It’s in the works: American Psycho the musical.
Literary murderers has always been a huge hit with the musical theatre crowd.
Before Johnny Depp was making people-pie in the movie version, Stephen Sondheim wrote the all-singing, all-dancing stage musical of Sweeney Todd. The character was first introduced in Victorian-era English comic books written about the homicidal barber whose victims became food. That was a hundred years before Charlton Heston was running around yelling “SOILENT GREEN IS PEOPLE”. Tres progressive.
Robert Louis Stephenson’s literary tribute to geminis “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, was also adapted into a musical which, at one stage, starred David Hasselhoff. That’s funny for numerous reasons.
The latest literary work to undergo theatrical treatment is none other than “American Psycho”, Bret Easton Ellis’s pitch black Eighties satire about a handsome, successful, cannibalising, sexually sadistic, necrophiliac psychopath. Insert a few big dance numbers and power ballads and you’ve got yourself what could potentially be the most outrageous musical ever. Ever…
Duncan Skeik, who won a Tony as composer of teenage sex dramedy “Spring Awakening” is composing the Eighties-flavoured tunes, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (who is a writer for HBO’s amazing polygamy melodrama “Big Love”) is writing the book; so all they need now is someone who can sing, dance, play ‘menacing’, all while looking hot with their shirt off…
