Woodstock Musical in the Works

From the Garden to Broadway:
Woodstock Musical in the Works

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/from-the-garden-to-broadway-woodstock-musical-in-the-works/?hp

By Dave Itzkoff
September 10, 2009

They say that if you can remember the original Woodstock festival,
you probably weren't there. But if you helped organize that three-day
concert of peace, love and music, you can produce a Broadway musical about it.

On Thursday, Michael Lang, one of the producers of the 1969 Woodstock
Music and Art Fair, said that he plans to bring a new show to
Broadway that will use elements from his recent memoir, "The Road to
Woodstock," written with Holly George-Warren.

"We've been thinking about a Broadway version of the experience for
years, but writing the memoir really brought it into focus for me,"
Mr. Lang said in a telephone interview. He said that the as-yet
untitled musical, which is planned for the 2010-2011 Broadway season,
would center less on the details of producing the festival than on
the lives of people who attended it and how the experience affected them.

"So many people have always expressed how Woodstock changed their
lives, and I thought there's really something about that experience
that was life-changing," Mr. Lang said. "The music is still wonderful
and the era is fascinating ­ so much happened that summer ­ that I
thought it was great material."

Mr. Lang, who is producing the musical with Samuel G. Nappi, the
chief executive of Alliance Energy in New York, said that he was in
talks with potential members of the show's creative team, but that
its lineup had not yet been completed. He said that the music of the
bands that performed at the Woodstock festival (a lineup that
included the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Sly and
the Family Stone), would probably be featured in the musical, and
that he was talking to some of the surviving artists about writing
new material for the show, though he declined to specify whom he was
speaking with.

Asked if a Woodstock musical risked sullying people's memories of the
festival, which has already been memorialized and merchandised in
almost every way imaginable, Mr. Lang said he did not think it would.

"I think that's something you have to wait and see, in terms of what
we actually do, before you judge it," he said. "And nobody's more
protective, I think, than I, in terms of what it means to us. So I
think it's in good hands."

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