Dusty Gets Jukebox Musical Treatment???

A new musical which uses the back-catalogue of a pop icon? Sure, it’s been done in London before, but not with the classics of Dusty Springfield. Producers of A Girl Called Dusty, the show which chronicles Dusty Springfield's life, are currently eyeing up the West End, and will continue the task of developing the piece further with a workshop production on the 29 February, presented at the Duchess Theatre. Scheduled to hit the West End in Autumn this year, the new musical features all the classic Dusty pop hits such as Son of a Preacher Man, The Look of Love, Wishin’ and Hopin, and You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. We’re assured that, “This is not a standard jukebox musical in which the plot is merely a thinly veiled excuse to jump from hit song to hit song. The plot drives the music… and the music moves the plot forward. They are seamlessly connected.”

The writer, Susan Fletcher, starred in the first staging of the piece which was then a one-woman show called Dusty Springfield, See All Her Faces, at the Triad Theatre in New York back in 2002. The show in its current form received its debut three-week run at The Provincetown Reparatory Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts where the Boston Herald said that “the script covers so much territory, it winds up being too glib.” But perhaps this upcoming workshop will iron out the kinks. It needs to, as the competition looms from Australia where a major tour of Dusty – The Musical, from the writers of Shout! currently touring the UK, was staged in 2006. Will two Dustys come to London? Watch this space…

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