Broadway Bacharach Promises London a Transfer???

The cool sounds of Burt Bacharach may soon be heard in the West End, if Rob Ashford’s big-budget revival of Promises, Promises, just opened this week at New York’s Broadway Theatre, gets its hoped-for transatlantic transfer. It stars Sean Hayes (aka Jack from TV’s Will & Grace) and the pint-sized Kristin Chenoweth (Wicked’s original Broadway Glinda). But, according to the Daily Mail, if and when it does come, it could be with Hayes and a few extra Bacharach songs – but without Chenoweth.

Famously, the 1968 piece – based on Billy Wilder and Neil Simon’s Oscar-winning 1960 film The Apartment, in which a man tries to climb the corporate ladder by letting bosses use his apartment for their romantic trysts – was the only musical written by supercool Sixties songwriter Burt Bacharach. The score by Bacharach, with lyrics by his long-time collaborator Hal David, includes the classic “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”.

Promises, Promises last had a major UK outing in a 2005 Sheffield Crucible production starring Emma Williams – for which a West End transfer failed to materialise. The new Broadway offering is produced by Candy Spelling, widow of the late American TV producer Aaron Spelling.