Musicals in the movies have sometimes struggled to hit the right note. For every smash success such as Chicago, there’s a Rent, which never seemed to strike a chord with cinemagoers.
Awful puns aside, that hasn’t stopped Fox 2000 from planning to remake the classic Carousel – and the company wants all-singing, all-dancing A-lister Hugh Jackman to star. There are a few hurdles to leap first, though. Fox has to lock down a deal with the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organisation for the rights to the music and lyrics. And Jackman has a deal with Disney to develop musicals on his own. But given that Fox will grab the Carousel rights, and that the X-Men star’s production company, Seed Productions, has a deal with the studio, it’s likely they can all get on the same page.
If you’ve never seen the musical, it’s a decidedly darker story than the name might suggest. It features Billy Bigelow (Jackman, should he sign on), a carnival barker who gets wrapped up in a botched robbery and ends up dead. In purgatory, he’s ordered to return to Earth and fix the issues he’s left behind.
Jackman has already sung the role once- at a 2002 concert to honour the authors. And his musical credentials are well up to date – he’s about to start a run of his most recent theatre job, The Boy From Oz, in Australia this week.