Fangs! Sex! Blood! Sex! A panther person! Sex! A Maenad! Sex! Fairies, unfortunately! Sex! Governmental oppression! Sex! A series that started out promisingly then got increasingly inconsistent and convoluted! Sex! But apparently still popular and/or promising enough to be turned into a musical! Sex! (probably, because really, what else was True Blood ever for?)
The New York Post reports that HBO — on which Alan Ball’s adaptation of Charlaine Harris’ The Southern Vampire Mysteries aired — is now in the midst of developing a Broadway musical based on the series. Since you can now make a musical out of just about anything that’s ever existed — American Psycho, the Color Purple, Waitress, and the upcoming Spongebob musical from revered theatre director Tina Landau, to name a few very different examples — this doesn’t seem like that farfetched an idea.
Director Pam MacKinnon (who incidentally also directed another recent musical adaptation, Amélie, and won a Tony for her Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf revival) is currently staging workshops of the production, while YA author Elizabeth Scott is doing all the writing based on the series that followed fairy/vampire sex enthusiast Sookie Stackhouse on her many perilous adventures in and around Bon Temps. True Blood series composer Nathan Barr is scoring the music to accompany Scott’s lyrics, and Alan Ball may be involved in “keeping an eye” on the project, in some way or another. Apparently, according to the Post, in its current state it’s in need of cuts, with a first act running 132 pages.
It sounds like the musical certainly isn’t trimming down the amount of mythological/folkloric creatures that ended up being featured in the series: set in the paranormally overstuffed town of Bon Temps, fairies, shape-shifters, werewolves, witches and of course vamps all seem to factor into the story of the musical.