NEW YORK — Pushing 76 years old, not that he looks remotely like it, Elton John is finally coming off the road.
John’s epic, worldwide, farewell stadium tour (which includes a goodbye Chicago stand on Aug. 5 at Soldier Field) became an even longer goodbye due to the pandemic and he’s said, many times now, that he now wants now to be home with his kids. “I don’t want to play live again,” he says over a Zoom call, “because it means I would have to travel.”
He’s also scored several Broadway musicals in the past — “Aida,” “The Lion King,” “Billy Elliot” — so he knows that they have to be wrestled into fruition, require much on-location tinkering and revision, take years to come together (or not) and are, generally, a pain in the neck for someone well past retirement age who has been so busy he couldn’t even make the queen’s Platinum Jubilee in person.
But when your husband is co-producing a Broadway musical with the title “The Devil Wears Prada,” a musical based on a movie where Meryl Streep, playing a thinly veiled version of fashion guru Anna Wintour, eats a dismissive underling played by Anne Hathaway, herself a thinly veiled version of the writer Lauren Weisberger, for breakfast before spitting her remains out for lunch, what’s a happily domesticated pop star gonna say?
“I almost immediately said yes,” John says, grinning. “’Music and fashion go hand in hand and it’s a great story.“
But “The Devil Wears Prada,” widely seen as an escapist fairy tale that went well with popcorn, comes from the halcyon early aughts, when the world was a different place.
Glossy fashion magazines like Vogue still had colossal influence, the fashion world not yet catering to instant influencers with iPhone 13s but to prestige publications with long lead times. Powerful editors still exhibited outsized power and a frisson of awe, even excitement, still attached itself to the scary, tyrannical, artistic boss. Interns and receptionists still huddled and swapped survival skills. And, of course, the industry itself still trafficked in their consumers’ shrewdly nurtured aspirations when it came to body size and type, not anything approaching everyday reality.
And social consciousness? Wrong industry, darling. Move on downtown.
John nods at that history.
“We sat down and approached the fact that the movie was 20 years ago and a lot has changed. Social media, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter. We thought, we just can’t put in this scenario from 20 years ago. We have to make it modern. We have to bring it up to date. And that appealed to me as well because I wanted to make the music modern. And it’s a woman’s story. So I said I’d like to have a woman as the lyric writer. ... I was sent three brilliant female lyricists and I picked Shaina Taub. It was a good choice. We’ve hit it off so well.”
John started, aptly enough, with a song called “I Mean Business” and then wrote some of the score in London, some of it in Toronto, some of it in Milan. Pretty much wherever he was on tour: “I just finished the last song last week, funnily enough,” he says.
There’s a song about Paris, a title number, a lot of up-tempo numbers in a variety of styles. “I’ve got very catholic tastes,” John says. “I can write all kinds of songs.”
Incontrovertibly. But if you exclude “Don’t Trust That Woman,” written in 1986 with a lyricist known as Cher, a number John’s own spouse and in-house critic, David Furnish, describes as “forgettable,” this collaboration with Taub actually is the first time one of the greatest pop songwriters in history has worked with a female lyricist. That’s especially notable, Furnish says, because John always has composed to preexisting lyrics.
“When I see the written word on a page, I’m off,” John says, agreeing with his husband.
: : :
But on the morning of June 24, the cast members of “The Devil Wears Prada,” which is being helmed by the former Steppenwolf Theatre artistic director Anna D. Shapiro, are in a less exuberant mood than their famous composer.
In a rehearsal room in midtown Manhattan, a group of artists are trying to carry on in the face of the just-announced Supreme Court decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling and allow the states to set their own rules when it comes to abortion rights, or the lack thereof.
Taub, who created the musical “Suffs,” had been expected in the room that morning but she was nowhere to be seen. Too upset, someone says. Shapiro, shaking her head at the news, is trying to pull together a cast finding it difficult to focus on fashion or musicals or anything, really, but on a court hardly known for its fashion sense.
One of the stars, Javier Muñoz, formerly of “Hamilton,” starts speaking to everyone there. He says the morning reminds him of the time Vice President Mike Pence came to see “Hamilton” (Pence found himself addressed from the stage). “We didn’t have a choice,” Muñoz says. “We were full of rage and frustration. But I remember feeling that he was coming to my house.”
Muñoz starts to speak louder: “We need to tell this story of inclusivity and humanity,” he says, standing in the middle of the room, “we just need to be so goddamn excellent and right in their faces.”
There is applause. A few tears get wiped away and the rehearsal resumes.
The first scene to be rehearsed is the most famous in the movie.
: : :
Any fan of “The Devil Wears Prada,” which cost some $41 million to film in 2006 but grossed $326 million worldwide, can pretty much recite every word. The fearsome Miranda Priestly, deliciously encapsulated by Streep at her peak, finally has had enough of Hathaway’s annoying Andy Sachs, a mousy, doe-eyed intellectual snob who looks down on the world of fashion as so much frivolity and triviality. Priestly launches into an eloquent tirade that defends her profession, her employees and her own creative class, and that explains to Andy that the blue sweater she is wearing, and that she no doubt fished out of a clearance bin “in some tragic Casual Corner,” was first sent out into the universe by the very trendsetters surrounding her.
“You are wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room,” Priestly says in the movie, causing theaters full of people (who still saw movies in theaters back then) to cheer at most of the showings.
The monologue does for the fashion industry what the climax of the movie “Ratatouille” does for food critics. It concisely and deliciously explains the importance of what they do.
In the musical, which has a book credited to Kate Wetherhead, that monologue is now a musical number, replete with designers interjecting, kvetching and responding as a kind of high-toned Greek chorus, albeit removed to Madison Avenue. But Beth Leavel, a much-loved Broadway star who says she is playing Miranda on her own terms (”apparently I have a very accessible inner bitch”) still takes down Taylor Iman Jones, who is playing the Hathaway role of Andy and who has been hanging onto this role through a series of pandemic delays and who said she feels both “lucky and special” to have the part.
The cast soon climbs its way into Act 2. It’s not unusual at Broadway rehearsals to use skeleton versions of the costumes the actors will be wearing, but the ones in play in “Devil Wears Prada” (designed by Arianne Phillips) are strikingly elaborate. That’s because everyone here clearly figured out that you couldn’t do “Devil Wears Prada” as a show without real fashion and that, with all due respect to costume designers, real fashion and theatrical design are not the same thing.
There is caginess over letting on which fashion houses the show will be showcasing — single-barrel names come up (there is one in the title, after all) and are then retracted as fast as they are uttered — but it’s obvious that the clothes will have to look very good indeed, needing as they must to fulfill not just the dramatic imperative of the story, but also the vicarious desires of the target audience that loves and remembers the movie and expects to gawk at attire worthy of a runway, not the clearance bins at Nordstrom Rack. Leavel dryly remarks that when a costume costs $30,000, it behooves an actress, even the star, to be willing to hang it up.
The idea is that the choreography, too, needs to have one foot in the world of fashion shows, and hence the selection of James Alsop, an enigmatic L.A.-based choreographer whose work for Beyoncé and others has spanned worlds far beyond Broadway. “I want to do Broadway choreography that’s not Broadway choreography,” Alsop says, a tad mysteriously. “Something fresh. Something new to Broadway.”
: : :
Although all producers always say to reporters that their shows are for everyone, the reality is that women between about age 30 and 60 are the most crucial sector of the Broadway demographic when it comes to actually buying tickets, even if they bring men and younger women along. “The Devil Wears Prada” plans to knock ‘em out like they’re in Milan, or, at least, fashion week in Tribeca.
The show’s lead producer, Kevin McCollum, picked out this film from the 20th Century Fox library after he signed a deal with the studio to comb through its backlist for a small number of projects that he thought “could sing.” Like many shows at this moment, the gestation of “Prada” has been profoundly interrupted by the pandemic and, as yet, the show does not have a confirmed Broadway theater, given all the comings and oft-unscheduled goings on the Rialto. Despite all the usual we’re-just-doing-it-for-here pronouncements, though, rest assured that it’s going to New York next season, barring some unforeseen disaster.
McCollum says that “Prada” cost somewhere around $20 million, pretty typical for a large musical that needs upscale production values and it’s part of a busy schedule for the highly experienced producer (whose career first blew up with “Rent”) that is strikingly centered on Chicago. After “Prada” gets it legs, McCollum will move over to Navy Pier, where he is working on “The Notebook,” another premiering movie-to-musical project, this one in collaboration with Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Most producers struggle to manage one huge show; McCollum is coming out of the pandemic by shepherding two at once.
He’s taking a number of other risks. Although she has worked on Broadway several times (most famously with “August: Osage County”), Shapiro has never before helmed a major musical like “Prada.” Clearly, she is having a good time, out of the crucible of the artistic directorship at a theater like Steppenwolf, which like some other ensemble theaters in Chicago has been beset by internal strife in the pandemic era. She is able instead to immerse herself in one high-profile show, the kind of project that, if it hits and sees multiple international companies, could make her wealthy and sought-after.
“I didn’t think there was anything new under the sun in a rehearsal room,” she says. “But look.” She also has a positive spin on the pandemic delay: “We’ve been able to go so much deeper, she says, because we have had so much more time.”
All that said, Shapiro also clearly has recalibrated her famously intense ambition. Like Elton John, she speaks now of slowing down some, of spending more time with her kids, of choosing projects based on the quality of the collaborators and the pleasure afforded, of having a life over a career. “All I want,” she says, waving off the pressure of working on such a boffo title, “is for this show to be really great. That’s all.”
“Some people would say I am Miranda,” Shapiro adds, dryly. “But I also once was an Andy. I am interested in how we bridge the gap between them.”
And there, as close as any other sentence, you have what the show is trying to bring to the table, its intended deviation from the movie.
John and Furnish both say that the farewell stand at Soldier Field was picked deliberately, coming as it does just two days before the opening of “Prada,” allowing John to come to Chicago early and maybe attend previews, maybe tinker with a few songs, should he have the inclination, or knock out another in his hotel room in the old-fashioned, out-of-town-tryout tradition. One last time. Or never say never.
McCollum says he already decided there would be no performance that Friday night. The cast all is going to Soldier Field to hear Elton John say goodbye.
———
“The Devil Wears Prada” runs July 19 to Aug. 21 at the Nederlander Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St.; 800-775-2000 and www.broadwayinchicago.com.
———
