Get Ready for Grunge: The Musical

Did you ever suffer through Rock of Ages and think, “Gee, this is really terrible and all, but I wish the songs were mopier?” Well, then, have we got news for you!

According to Variety, some of the people behind the original stage production of Rock of Ages are now setting their sites on the Alternative Nation set:

“Seattle Repertory Theatre has commissioned a new musical set in the grunge scene in 1990s Seattle, featuring an original, fictional story told with pre-existing songs of the era by acts such as Alice in Chains and Soundgarden.

“Some or all of the tunes for the project, currently untitled and targeted for a developmental workshop late this year, will be drawn from BMG’s publishing catalog, which includes the work of Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Smashing Pumpkins. Manage This Media’s Janet Billig Rich, the former manager of Nirvana who now works in music licensing (for shows including ‘Rock of Ages’), and BMG exec Elyse Cogan are both on board the brewing musical.”

The article continues:

“It’s still early days in the musical’s development, with creatives still formulating the wish list of tunes they hope to use to tell the story. From a licensing perspective, the writers of the songs will be counted among the authors of the theatrical production, since the lyrics are being used to tell the story. Final rights approval will come from each song’s copyright holder, often a publisher or a manager.”

And in case there was any doubt that is basically going to be Rock of Ages but with grunge songs, the show was both conceived and will be directed by Wendy C. Goldberg, who also a Creative Advisor on Rock of Ages.

So, it’s possible that this doesn’t end up being terrible. But most likely, it will be terrible. Profitable, sure, but terrible.

This also probably puts us about twelve years away from the debut of a nu-metal musical, at which point I plan to just become an anti-Broadway terrorist.