Broadway to Get Elvis Musical in 2005

All Shook Up, a new musical inspired by and featuring the songs of Elvis Presley, is making its way toward Broadway. Commissioned by Elvis Presley Enterprises, the show features more than 20 songs made popular by Elvis Presley, including Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me Tender, Can't Help Falling In Love, Don't Be Cruel, Burning Love, Teddy Bear, A Little Less Conversation, and, of course, All Shook Up. Neither a revue of Elvis' music nor an Elvis biography, All Shook Up is an original musical comedy in which a magical jukebox and a leather-jacketed stranger transform a loveless town.

Written by Joe DiPietro, who wrote the long-running musical hit I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, and directed by Christopher Ashley, who was Tony nominated for Rocky Horror, All Shook Up will receive its first regional production in May 2004 at Goodspeed Musicals Click Here, followed by a commercial out-of-town engagement in December. It will open on Broadway in Spring 2005.

All Shook Up is being produced by Jonathan Pollard, Bernie Kukoff, Clear Channel Entertainment, Miramax Films, Stanley Buchthal, Harbor Entertainment, and Harvey Weinstein.

This musical's original working title was Can't Help Falling in Love. Below is an article from the Memphis Commercial Appeal published earlier this year before the name change.

Blue suede shows

Introducing the lyrical Elvis to the farcical Shakespeare - on Broadway

By Christopher Blank (August 9, 2003)

Act 1: The setting is a rehearsal studio in Manhattan, where a read-through of a brand new musical is about to start. On one side of the room, against a long window overlooking noisy West 42nd Street, twenty actors adjust the music stands in front of them and glance through photocopied scripts.

They're nervous. They've had about 25 hours to rehearse this most recent draft, music included.

Standing between them and a legion of busy-looking New York theater producers and investors is an upright piano, where a frazzled young music director flips through pencil-marked sheet music.

Seen over his shoulder, the song titles look strangely unoriginal.

Heartbreak Hotel.

He flips a page.

Blue Suede Shoes.

Another turn.

Burnin' Love . . In the Ghetto . . . One Night With You.

Enter Christopher Ashley, the tall, angular director of this production.

"Thank you all for coming," he says. "And welcome to this read-through of Can't Help Falling in Love: A New Musical Inspired by and Featuring the Songs of Elvis Presley." He introduces the cast of readers and moves to the side.

Our three main characters - the director, playwright and producer - stand out in the audience.

Ashley's facial expressions change like that of a kid on a roller coaster as the actors rock and roll through the script.

In the back of the room, a man with a furrowed brow strokes his chin and listens to the reactions. Playwright Joe DiPietro has major rewrites in store. His fourteenth draft (the current one) may sound very different than the final one, which might be No. 40 or so.

Lastly, a man gravely works the room in a dark blue business suit. Producer Jonathan Pollard isn't usually so formal. He'll later be seen near Times Square wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, but for now, his costume says: "money."

The three colleagues are in psychic harmony.

With DiPietro's script, Pollard's right to use a bunch of Elvis Presley tunes and Ashley's $10 million staging, Can't Help Falling in Love could be a blockbuster musical when it opens on Broadway late next summer.

Act 2: Scene change. Flashback to 2001, when the hit musical Mamma Mia! opened on Broadway, featuring the well-known songs of the 1970s Swedish pop quartet ABBA.

Jack Soden, CEO of Elvis Presley Enterprises, thinks the show is "a neat idea," mostly because the plot isn't about ABBA. It's a love story that takes place on a Mediterranean island.

While musical revues like Smokey Joe's Cafe have been around since the dawn of musical theater, blending familiar rock and roll songs into an unrelated plot is a relatively new concept. The recent film Moulin Rouge is another success.

"We wanted to find a fresh way to use our music," says Soden, a self-described musical theater fan. "We wanted to be conscious of Elvis but we didn't want any element of his life story in the show. Nobody with inexplicably long sideburns or in jumpsuits. Mamma Mia! wasn't about four Swedish kids. It was just a really cute book made really fun by the unique music."

Though Elvis didn't compose his own music, his manager Col. Tom Parker secured half the publishing rights to most of the material he recorded; thus, his estate can license it out.

Soden only needed a skillful playwright.

A phone rings at DiPietro's apartment. It's the president of Williamson Music, a publishing company founded by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, which manages more than 400 tunes in the Elvis catalog.

" 'Do you think you can do something with Elvis Presley songs?' " DiPietro remembers Maxyne Berman Lang asking. "I immediately said, 'Yes! I'm your guy.' For whatever reason, I just keyed into it."

Act 3: DiPietro sits in Angus McIndoe restaurant on West 44th Street, the day after the read-through.

The playwright is coffee-alert, hurried but focused, a man with many projects blooming at once: at least five new shows opening in the coming year - three regionally, two in New York.

Even in Elvis' hometown, theatergoers know his work.

His 1996 musical I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, still running Off Broadway, played to a packed Circuit Playhouse in 2001. It's coming back by popular demand this season. His nonmusical comedy Over the River and Through the Woods was Circuit's surprise hit last summer.

Gulps of black coffee fuel DiPietro's stream of words.

"This is a backward way of writing a story, because you have to figure out how to fit the music into it. I knew initially that it was going to be a romantic comedy. I thought that the first act should end with a choral arrangement of Can't Help Falling In Love, but sung by people who are all in love with the wrong person.

"I met with the Elvis folks and told them some of my ideas. We agreed that the show wouldn't be about Elvis; there would be no mention of him. And that's what they wanted - no Elvis imitators."

Dream sequence. Sunlight floods the stage. DiPietro is vacationing in Rome a few months after the initial idea gets the green light. He's a little uneasy because, after reading several biographies on Elvis, listening to more than 800 songs, and "internalizing" tons of material, a story line still hasn't come to him.

"I was relaxing at the Forum in Rome and for whatever reason I was looking at the architecture thinking, 'This is so Shakespearean in feel' and I guess I had Elvis in the back of my mind and I thought: 'Shakespeare. Elvis. Ah, a Shakespeare comedy with Elvis songs.' And at that moment the light went on."

Act 4: This scene takes place inside Ashley's head as he watches his actors - some of whom may make it to the final production - recite the lines and sing the music.

The reading isn't as easy as it looks. Music director Stephen Oremus's arrangements aren't karaoke editions of Elvis tunes. They've got gospel inflections, musical theater enhancements. They've been remodeled into duets and big choral numbers.

Though Ashley is confident about the concept, he feels like a jockey, riding a bumpy read-through to the finish line.

He and DiPietro hold a running commentary with their facial expressions. A nod and a smile when a joke works on the small audience. A big-eyed expression of 'ouch' when one flops.

"It was just such a great initial idea," he'll say later. "It's like Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night where everything is sort of ridiculously overheated. Everybody has libido gone crazy; passion with no reins."

"Ridiculously overheated" shows are Ashley's specialty. Recent successes include directing the revival of the Rocky Horror Show. At the Kennedy Center's Sondheim festival last year, he directed Sweeny Todd and Merrily We Roll Along.

The two hours pass in a stressful jam of mental notes.

This is the last read-through before Can't Help Falling in Love goes into full production mode.

"Musicals are never finished before opening night on Broadway," he reassures a skeptical onlooker. "They reform themselves all the way up until then. The exciting thing is going to see a musical where Elvis' music bursts out of the story."

Act 5: Our scene is again a table at Angus McIndoe. Producer Jonathan Pollard appears the day after the read-through wearing tropical attire but with the air of one used to pulling strings, a Prospero newly returned from Club Med.

Along with his partner Bernie Kukoff, Pollard found backers in some of Broadway's biggest investors, including Clear Channel and Miramax.

"Elvis stood at a crossroads of three revolutions," the producer intones. "A color revolution, a sexual revolution and a music revolution. These are the three themes that run through the show."

His initial description makes this Broadway-bound musical comedy sound like a serious drama. But Pollard can't contain his inner Elvis fan.

The talkative, amiable man reluctantly divulges: "I was a huge Elvis fan as a kid. When I was in elementary school, I used to feign illness on certain parts of the day so I could get home early and see the reruns of Elvis movies. This was before VCRs. I was an Elvis junkie."

As the conversation ends, Pollard predicts a Broadway hit for late next summer, if only because he has faith in his creative team and the music.

The real work begins now, getting the show up and running for a workshop.

Cue lyric: "A little less conversation, a little more action please."

Blackout.

- Christopher Blank

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