According to the New York Post, Alex Timbers, director of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s hit rock musical Here Lies Love and co-creator of the series Mozart in the Jungle, is set to direct a Broadway musical adaptation of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.
The director recently made the news for exiting his role as director (or, it seems, being dismissed by Disney) of the upcoming Frozen on Broadway, a massive production that the Post says was rumored to have overwhelmed the director.
That’s no great tragedy, since his other projects sound more intriguing. Timbers is currently at work on David Byrne’s newest theatrical endeavor, a musical about Joan of Arc for the Public. The Post alleges that that’ll be coming sometime this Winter, and that Beetlejuice — which will be produced by Warner Brothers — is preliminarily planned to arrive sometime in the 2018-2019 season. Unfortunately, nothing else has been revealed about the far-off production.
Beetlejuice, the 1988 movie, starred Winona Ryder, Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Catherine O’Hara, and saw Davis and Baldwin as a couple of very kind ghosts living in their former home in rural Connecticut, which is currently being taken over by a family of sinister New Yorkers; well, mostly O’Hara’s character. O’Hara plays a New York sculpture artist who’s intent on renovating the entire house to look like her frightening, imposing artwork, while Ryder plays her teenage stepdaughter, who sees and befriends the ghosts, and is sympathetic to their struggle to keep their home as it was during their lifetime.