Tim Rice Goes From Here to Eternity???

Lyricist Tim Rice hasn’t given up on plays to bring the screen classic From Here to Eternity to the musical stage (See The Goss, 15 Jul 2002). Rice has been working on the projects for several years with young British composer Stuart Brayson, but a mention this week in the Sunday Times suggests that the nurturing may be paying off soon.

The 1953 Oscar-winning film about US soldiers in Hawaii before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour starred Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed. When Rice was interviewed about the project seven years ago, his fantasy casting targets were Catherine Zeta Jones and Kevin Spacey to play officer’s wife Karen Holmes and her enlisted lover Sgt Milton, characters immortalised by Kerr and Lancaster with the film’s crashing-waves-on-beach love scene. What’s more, he envisaged Johnny Depp in the conflicted Montgomery Clift role of Private Prewitt.