A Musical Even the Fanboys Are Geeked Over: A Word With DTC's It's Superman Writer

By Robert Wilonsky Mon., Feb. 15 2010 at 4:42 PM

Categories: Stage

From time to time, I've checked in with Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty to see how his Superman musical's coming. But so far, we've yet to speak with his It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman collaborator, playwright and TV scribe and Marvel comics author Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. This afternoon, Comic Book Resources fills that void, as Aguirre-Sacasa updates us on the project set to debut at the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre on June 19.

Actually, he more or less repeats much of what Moriarty told us in November: The songs from the original 1966 Broadway musical will more or less remain the same, but the plot's been reworked from cape to boots. Think Fleischer Studios cartoons meets His Girl Friday. And, unlike the original musical, which came and went faster than a speeding bullet, this one features not only Lex Luthor, but a host of familiar Superman baddies:

"Luthor assembles a team of super-villains to do his dirty work for him, arming them each with a different colored piece of kryptonite (He's trying to fabricate green kryptonite, but he can't figure out the last, unknown element). The villains are all drawn from Superman's history, recent and distant. The Prankster and Toyman, of course, and Magpie from John Byrne's run (though she's been retro-fitted into the period), Terra-Man from the 1970s (the musical's debuting in Texas, so it's great to have a cowboy in there), the Scarlet Widow, who's from the old radio serial (here a 'sapphic scourge of the underworld') and Hocus and Pocus, who will be like evil magicians from vaudeville."

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