Between Carrie White and Patrick Bateman, the musical theater landscape is about to be splattered in blood. The long gestating musical version of American Psycho is apparently not only still being worked on, it could hit the regional theater circuit as early as next year. At least that is what composer Duncan Sheik, who happens to have a new album out, tells the Journal.
"I was just in London and met with Rupert Goold, who’s going to be directing the show," Sheik told the paper's Speakeasy blog. "We’re plotting a set of workshops in September of this year and we hope to quickly go to a regional theater in the beginning of 2012. I wish these things happened faster, but I have written 14 new songs and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who’s writing the script, is in the middle of the second act. Now we have to get down to the brass tacks of developing it."
Since Mary Harron adapted Bret East Ellis' satirical novel American Psycho into a 2000 Christian Bale vehicle (which Leonardo DiCaprio was once attached to), the once highly-controversial book has become much more palatable to the general public (brief recap: the book's original publisher refused to publish it and Ellis's received many death threats after it was released).
The book already has a killer connection to music: three chapters are just terrifying discographies of popular glossy bands from the 80s, and Sheik, who wrote the music and lyrics for the popular Spring Awakening, seems to be embracing those cues. "With my [80s] covers [album] I’m doing it because I really love these songs and want to pay tribute, where in the case of “American Psycho,” Bret was definitely going after these particular recordings and, as far as I’m concerned, in some cases rightfully so. I won’t name names, but they’re the most egregious examples of bad ‘80s production." Here, let's let Bale as Bateman name those names for you.
If you are expecting American Psycho: The Musical to be a straight up old school Broadway spectacular, however, you may well be disappointed. In an interview with the A/V Club in 2009 Ellis described the show as it was gestating:
It’s not what you think at all. It’s a rock musical, with like a band. It’s like a multimedia rave situation. It’s not like a straight-ahead Broadway musical with guys in Armani suits doing jazz hands with an old-style score. It’s like a concert, in a way. You get this idea in your head that it’s 42nd Street or something, and it’s not. It’s a very different kind of musical. We’ll see. It’s still a long way down the road. But I’ve talked to everybody involved, and the reason to move forward with it was exactly because of how the guys who are doing this want to do it. It’s not old-school Broadway. It’s very new, interesting concepts.
This could be fun! But will the musical retain Bateman's obsession with the musical of Les Miserables (it is mentioned 19 times in the book)? There is little justice in the world if a musical about an angry man can't reference people "singing a song of angry men!"
