The musical based on John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is coming to Broadway, Deadline reports.
The play, which premiered in Chicago earlier this year and ran for nearly seven weeks, will open in New York next year.
Berendt’s book, published in 1994 by Random House, is the nonfiction account of a Savannah, Georgia, antiques dealer who was tried for killing Danny Hansford, a sex worker in the city. A critic for Kirkus called the book “stylish, brilliant, hilarious, and coolhearted.”
The book, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was a massive hit, staying on the New York Times bestseller list for more than four years. It was adapted into a 1997 film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Kevin Spacey, John Cusack, and Jude Law.
The musical adaptation features a book by Taylor Mac and music by Jason Robert Brown. A critic for Variety wrote that the Chicago run showed promise, calling it “admirably bold” and “unconventionally self-aware.”
Berendt said in a statement that he watched the musical planning to take notes but didn’t do so because he was “captivated by Jason Robert Brown’s imaginative score, Taylor Mac’s ingenious rendering of the (admittedly) complicated 388-page book, Tanya Birl-Torres’s supple choreography and Rob Ashford’s resourceful and energetic shaping of it all in Christopher Oram’s enchanting and right-on-target sets. So, I just sat back and enjoyed the show.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
