Flaming Lips fans have a new album to look forward to this April, and now the musical version of their 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots will be making its world premiere this winter (with a debut at California’s La Jolla Playhouse). The production will be written and directed by Des McAnuff who oversaw the current Broadway run of Jesus Christ Superstar and Jersey Boys. In 2007, The Social Network director Aaron Sorkin was attached to the project, but the L.A. Times is reporting that his name is curiously missing from the press release announcement with no reason given.
The musical adaptation will “tell the story of a young Japanese artist who journeys into a robot world where she must contend with a host of evil forces.” La Jolla announced that the show will feature “multimedia stage effects” and will contain songs from a variety of other albums by the band, including The Soft Bulletin and At War with the Mystics. Frontman Wayne Coyne has been chatting with McAnuff about the production since its inception, but the L.A. Times doesn’t describe the extent of his involvement with the finished product.
Coyne spoke to Entertainment Weekly in 2007 about the concept, comparing it to Terry Gilliam’s dystopian sci-fi movie Brazil :
“There’s the real world and then there’s this fantastical world,” he said. ”This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of something. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It’s almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that.”
Lips fans, are you digging it?