Regina Spektor & New Musical

Regina Spektor Will Pen Music for Landau's Grimm-Inspired Beauty Musical
By Kenneth Jones16 Sep 2009


Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor, known for plucky and searching alt pop songs, will collaborate with playwright-director Tina Landau and lyricist Michael Korie to create a Broadway-aimed musical, Beauty, a new riff on "Sleeping Beauty," to be produced by Elephant Eye Theatrical.
Landau (Floyd Collins) will write the book and direct; Spektor (a Sire/Warner Bros. recording artist) the music, and Korie (Happiness, Grey Gardens) the lyrics.
Stuart Oken, Michael Leavitt, Five Cent Productions make up Elephant Eye, which is also behind the new musical The Addams Family. They are aiming Beauty for the 2011-12 Broadway season, following an out-of-town tryout.
Beauty is billed as "an expansion of Landau's 2002 acclaimed one-act play produced by the La Jolla Playhouse; Beauty uses the 1812 Grimm fairy tale 'Sleeping Beauty' as a jumping off point for a contemporary and hauntingly provocative story of beauty lost and beauty found."
Known for her alternately frisky and ruminative lyrics and piano-based music, Spektor is a Russian-born, Bronx-bred artist who practiced on an out-of-tune piano in the basement of her local synagogue before she emerged as a singer-songwriter in small clubs in New York City in 2001. Her latest album is "far," following her breakout recording "Begin To Hope" (which has sold more than one millions copies worldwide). She'll appear on TV's "Saturday Night Live" on Oct. 10 and will headline at Radio City Music Hall on Oct. 14.