…On Off-Broadway! It’s official, the musical based on the life story of The Shaggs, “The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World”, created by Joy Gregory, John Langs and Yours Truly, is headed for a major production that is at the pinnacle of Off-Broadway on fabled 42nd street – at Playwrights’ Horizons, the people who brought you “Grey Gardens”, “Floyd Collins”, and Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins”, and” Sunday in the Park with George”. Co-producing with them for the first time is the esteemed New York Theatre Workshop, whose productions include “Rent” and “Bright Lights, Big City”.
Hoo-boy, I can’t wait to invite my mama to this show! But first, I have to finish writing it. Yes, I know, we’ve been working on it for 9 years, you’d think it would be finished by now, but I’m born to tinker, and there’s just a few things that need fixing here and there. It’s great, it’s good to go, but if I gotta rent a tux to go to the opening night, I want to make sure everything in the show is polished to perfection. As I last wrote to you about this, we were just about to do a reading at Playwrights’ Horizons in December. That reading went very well, and showed us places that needed work. We worked those places, and had another fine reading in April, where we found a few more things to work on, and also got a fire lit under a bunch of producers. After a couple months of shaking things out, New York Theatre Workshop came on board to co-produce, and now we’re on track to a full production this coming spring.
You can read all about it in the New York Times…
The rumors are all true.