It’s been a weird day for David Bowie news.
First word of a $400 life-sized pillow made the rounds on Dangerous Minds, and now we’ve learned that when Ziggy plays guitar, he jamming good with Patrick and Squidward.
Bowie is one of a few big-name artists confirmed to write songs for an upcoming SpongeBob Squarepants musical, joining Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, Dirty Projectors, The Flaming Lips, John Legend, Lady Antebellum, Cyndi Lauper, Panic! At the Disco, Plain White T’s, They Might Be Giants, and others who will pen music for the theatre run of the cult Nickelodeon TV show.
According to Entertainment Weekly, via Pitchfork, the Spongebob musical premieres at Chicago’s Oriental Theatre. The production runs in a limited engagement, starting June 7 and wrapping July 3 before a planned Broadway opening in the 2016-2017 season. The play is directed and “co-conceived” by Tina Landau with music supervision by Tom Kitt. It’s being billed as a “one of a kind musical event” with original songs from the artists mentioned above.
“I was drawn to this project not only for its wild theatrical possibility, but also because I felt SpongeBob, at its core, is a layered and hilarious ensemble comedy,” Landau said in a press statement, via EW. “SpongeBob himself is of course its center and beating heart — the eternal innocent in a sea of cynics. He’s also the classic underdog hero, and so our production sets him on a hero’s journey with real stakes, all the while retaining the show’s trippy humor and irreverence. We’re taking our leads from the TV show but this is an original story, with an original design approach, and original songs written just for the occasion by an amazing array of songwriters. We will present the world of Bikini Bottom and its characters in a whole new way that can only be achieved in the live medium of the theatre.”
She adds: “We’re bringing the show’s fabled characters to life through actors — not prosthetics or costumes that hide them — and we’re deploying some unconventional stage craft that will prove that anything can happen in Bikini Bottom.”
If only the Thin White Duke himself could play Spongebob.