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'Doctor Zhivago' is heading to Broadway next spring

Casting is expected to be announced soon.

By Karen Butler
Image courtesy of Polk & Co.
Image courtesy of Polk & Co.

NEW YORK, Oct. 2 (UPI) -- The new Broadway musical Doctor Zhivago is to open April 21, the show's producers announced this week.

The stage adaptation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning, Russian masterpiece will begin preview performances March 27 at the Broadway Theatre in New York.

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Casting is expected to be announced soon.

"This sweeping musical romance, which revolves around five intertwined lovers set against a panoramic portrait of a nation in upheaval, is directed by two-time Tony Award-winner Des McAnuff," a news release said.

McAnuff's credits include Jesus Christ Superstar, Guys and Dolls, The Farnsworth Invention, Jersey Boys and Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays.

Doctor Zhivago will feature a book by Michael Weller, music by Lucy Simon, lyrics by Michael Korie and Amy Power, and choreography by Kelly Devine.

"I have always had a very personal feeling about Boris Pasternak's novel and a tremendous respect for the David Lean film. Before I even started thinking it might be possible to write a musical based on this work, I reread the novel three times. Only after I grasped the significance of the last chapter, 'The Poems of Yurii Zhivago,' did I see a way forward," Simon said in a statement.

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"After completing the prose novel, Pasternak wrote 25 poems -- poems that Zhivago had been in the process of creating throughout the novel. If read by themselves, the poems capture the novel and retell it in a different form. That concept of being able to reduce the size of the novel by translating into another language -- music -- was my thrilling challenge. Also igniting my interest was the discovery that Doctor Zhivago is more than a story about love and revolution. It is a novel about the irreducible force of creation rising from the ashes of revolution -- a creation that continues and informs the future."

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