All right everyone, gird your loins. Devil Wears Prada is heading to Broadway with help from Elton John. Deadline reported that John, along with playwright Paul Rudnick, is working on a musical adaptation of the 2006 movie starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Emily Blunt. All three of them are phenomenal singers, which hopefully the casting director won't forget; you know you want to see Streep win a Tony already. While some may be surprised to hear that Devil Wears Prada is being given the musical treatment, John said in a statement that he believes it's a perfect fit for Broadway:
Re-imagining The Devil Wears Prada for the musical theatre is super exciting. I’m a huge fan of both the book and the feature film and a huge aficionado of the fashion world. I can’t wait to sink my musical teeth into this hunk of popular culture.
John should certainly know what makes for a good Broadway musical since he has a history of working on successful shows. The music he wrote for Disney's The Lion King with Tim Rice ended up inspiring the very successful The Lion King musical, which debuted on Broadway in 1997. It's the third longest running Broadway show in history behind Phantom of the Opera and Chicago.
He would re-team with Rice for 2000's Aida, based on the 19th century Italian opera of the same name that looks at the forbidden love between a Nubian princess and an Egyptian soldier. The show took home five Tonys that same year, including a Best Actress in a Musical win for Heather Headley.
His 2005 Lestat musical, based on Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire protagonist, didn't take Broadway by storm — it closed less than a month after opening — but, three years later, he was the toast of the Great White Way with Billy Elliot: The Musical based on the 2000 film. The show, which looked at a young boy in a mining town's journey from boxing to ballet, took home 10 Tonys, including Best Musical.
There's no set timeline for The Devil Wears Prada musical, but let's hope that, whenever it does premiere, we get to see Miranda Priestley belt out a song about cerulean and its place in all our lives.
