The Canadian-made Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone is being developed into a movie musical – and Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush is slated to play the lead.
Screenwriter and director Don McKellar, who co-created the Tony-winning musical with Bob Martin, Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, confirmed that Rush hopes to reprise the role of Man in Chair in a film adaptation.
Rush first played Man in Chair – the show's musical-obsessed, cardigan-wearing narrator – in the Australian premiere at the Melbourne Theatre Company earlier this year.
“We saw him and he was excellent – and also he's an excellent person,” McKellar told the Globe and Mail. “We're pretty excited about being involved with him”
Rush, who is in Toronto for the world premiere of his new film The King’s Speech at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, will be sticking around for a couple of days to work with The Drowsy Chaperone team.
“He is incredibly Man in Chair-like,” McKellar said of Rush. “When he was a little boy, instead of playing with trucks, he was making model theatres out of shoeboxes.”
McKellar kept tight-lipped about any other details about the film – it’s in early stages right now and there’s not even a script. “We're pursuing it in various ways, but there's nothing concrete to say,” he said.
McKellar did say he hoped The Drowsy Chaperone would make it to the screen in less time than it took to get to Broadway, which isn’t saying all that much – the show debuted in 1998 at the Rivoli in Toronto and opened in New York on the Great White Way eight years later.
