Too Big For Broadway: ‘The Bible,’ the Musical
Coming soon to an arena near you: the Torah!
A big-budget adaptation of the Old Testament will tour the United States starting in late 2012 or early 2013, reports entertainment website Deadline Hollywood. The show, simply called “The Bible,” is being helmed by Philip William McKinley, the director who stepped in to save the massively overbudget “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” on Broadway earlier this year.
The new show sounds like an ambitious but fitting undertaking for McKinley, whose previous productions include directing the Ringling Bros. Circus. “The Bible” is envisioned as an elaborate musical version of the Old Testament, starting with Adam and Eve and climaxing with Moses’ receipt of the Ten Commandments at Sinai.
The show will be too big to fit inside a Broadway theater, so will instead hit “the road like an arena rock band tour” after running for several months in a single venue. The “arena rock” analogy sounds apt: the set designers are Mark Fisher and Ray Winkler, who previously worked on U2’s 360 tour.
Clearly, though, the show will differ from most of what you’d see in a stadium — the angel Gabriel will be among its narrators, and high points will include the parting of the Red Sea.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO