The Rocky films are great aren’t they? They started off as a gritty fictional document of a rising boxing star, closing with a film that showed Rocky Balboa resembling a relaxed, tanned phallus that has been dipped in a particularly aggressive wasp nest.
And while you think that Rocky was out for the count (or, It Really Should’ve Thrown The Towel In At Rocky IV Because It Was Ace), you’d be massively wrong.
That’s because Rocky is climbing up the ropes again in slow motion, this time with another hugely stupid idea which sounds like the work of a satirist. Ladies and gentlemen, in the blue corner we have decency which is already weeping… and his opponent, in the red corner, Rocky: The Broadway Musical!
That’s right. You are not dreaming that last sentence. A team of berks, comprising of Tony Award-winning songwriters Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, alongside Thomas Meehan who has been involved with Hairspray, Annie and The Producers, are working on a musical adaptation of a bunch of films that star a central character who talks like he’s deaf.
The show is set to hit Broadway by 2013.
Better yet is that Sylvester Stallone is throwing his oar in, attending a private reading of the show which was held in New York recently.
Meehan says:
“At first I thought, all the world needs is a ?Rocky? musical. But then I looked at the film. I thought it had beautiful construction and such high emotion, and it was a natural musical: There is a David and Goliath story, a Cinderella story, a love story between two outcasts. It's less about boxing than about finding self-respect and finding your soul mate.”
So, what can we expect from Rocky: The Musical?
Well, initially, we’d hoped it would just be two fellas on a stage knocking forty shades of shit out of each other, allowing pretentious theatre-goers to coo about how visceral and ‘powerfully brutal’ the whole spectacle is. However, it is clear that this wouldn’t be enough as a musical with no songs isn’t a musical at all.
As such, we’d like to see a rendition of a song called ‘Adrian’ (yes, that’s how you spell it. No, it isn’t ‘Adrienne’. We know. Don’t blame us), which sees the assembled cast delivering the name, over and over in the iconic manner that Stallone delivered it in the film, leaving audiences treated to a sound not unlike six bull seals being clubbed over the head with rubber mallets.
We’d also like to see a song based on the robot that Paulie gets for his birthday. And don’t forget James Brown’s ‘Livin’ In America’. It would be utterly, utterly pointless without it.
Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!
Jesus says
Jesus is now weeping, curled in a corner, banging his head on the wall. I on the other hand now have a great urge to go throw up and simultaneously shit all over the place. There are certainly some fucked up people in this world.