Bridget Jones The Musical Set for 2011???

Singletons rejoice! The Bridget Jones franchise is extending to the musical stage, with a West End premiere on target for early 2011.

According to today’s Daily Mail, Bridget creator Helen Fielding has been working for several months on the adaptation, which is being produced by Working Title, the company which was also behind the hapless heroine’s screen incarnations and which has already had huge success with its screen-to-stage crossover of Billy Elliot. No creative team has yet been attached to the Bridget musical, though Billy’s director and choreographer, Stephen Daldry and Peter Darling, did reportedly attend a recent private reading for it.

Capturing the Nineties zeitgeist – and spawning a whole copycat genre of “chick lit” – Bridget Jones started life in 1995 as an Independent newspaper column, written by Fielding and chronicling the highs and lows of single thirtysomething London woman, including her calorie and cigarette counts and romantic misadventures. The first novel, Bridget Jones’ Diary was published in 1996, followed by the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, in 1999.

Both novels were made into blockbuster films, released by Working Title in 2001 and 2004 respectively, and starring Renee Zellwegger as Bridget and Colin Firth and Hugh Grant as her competing love interests, Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver. No word yet on who might play the roles on stage, though Jack Davenport apparently took part in the reading as bad boy Daniel.