“Head Over Heels,” a musical featuring songs from the Go-Go’s, appears to be prepping for a Broadway debut next season.
The musical posted an equity casting notice for roles that include out-of-town engagement in spring 2018 and a Broadway run in the 2018 to 2019 season. The show, which draws on a 16th-century text as source material, had its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015.
The casting notice lists Rick Ferrari, Donovan Leitch and Christine Russell as producers. Gwyneth Paltrow had been reported as a prospective producer in the past.
Two Tony-Award winners are helming the project, with Michael Mayer, who recently directed “Terms of My Surrender” on Broadway, as the director, and Jeff Whitty, who wrote “Avenue Q,” as the writer.
According to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival description, the show is an “irreverent” Elizabethan love story, inspired by Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral text “Arcadia.” The story involves a duke and two daughters, one of whom is lucky in love and the other who is lacking in suitors. The story is accompanied by a pop score from the 1980s rockers, the Go-Go’s.
The roles of the two daughters, as well as those of a male suitor and a prime minister, have already been cast, according to the casting notice.
The Broadway-bound musical lists Tom Kitt as its music supervisor and Spencer Liff as its choreographer in the notice.
When the show premiered in Oregon, where it was directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskander, it was met with somewhat mixed reviews. Local papers praised it, with Ashland Daily Tidings declared it “a nonstop party.” And Charles Isherwood, reviewing it for The New York Times, similarly called it a “funny and frolicsome concoction,” but said the songs were “thin compositions that…did little to enhance the story.”
The show held a developmental workshop earlier this year, according to an earlier casting notice.
For what it’s worth, this would not be the first musical entitled “Head Over Heels” to make its Broadway debut. In 1918, a tuner with the same title played 100 performances on Broadway, according to the Internet Broadway Database.
