Flashdance: The Musical to Open on Broadway in August 2013

Flashdance: The Musical is aiming to open on Broadway in August 2013, with a separate company embarking on a previously announced national tour in January 2013. Directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo (Jersey Boys, Memphis), the Broadway production will be “substantially rewritten and completely restaged under its new producing team following its London world premiere,” according to an official announcement. No casting, theater or exact dates for the Broadway production have been announced.

Inspired by the hit 1983 film, Flashdance: The Musical tells the story of Alex Owens, a working class girl from Pittsburgh who works as a steel mill welder by day and a bar dancer at night, nursing a dream of attending a prestigious ballet academy. When Alex catches the eye of her boss Nick Hurley, their romance drives her ambition to pursue her dream.

Flashdance features a book by Tom Hedley (co-writer of the original screenplay with Joe Eszterhas), and Robert Cary, music by Robbie Roth and lyrics by Cary and Roth. The score includes hits such as the Oscar-winning “Flashdance – What a Feeling,” “Maniac,” “Gloria,” “Manhunt” and “I Love Rock and Roll,” plus 16 new original songs.

A stage adaptation of Flashdance was first produced in July 2008 at Theatre Royal Plymouth, toured the U.K. in 2009 and opened at the West End’s Shaftesbury Theatre in September 2010, closing earlier than planned on January 15, 2011.

Flashdance will be produced on Broadway by Steven Baruch, Tom Viertel, Marc Routh, Richard Frankel, Terri and Timothy Childs, Transamerica with executive producer Tom Hedley in association with Paramount Pictures. Speaking for the team, Routh said in a statement, “[Sergio Trujillo has] come up with new ways of storytelling through dance that bring you immediately to the heart of this iconic story of a girl with a dream in a way I’ve never seen…. We can’t wait to for audiences to embrace this new musical across the country on tour and then in the separate flagship production on Broadway.”

The Flashdance tour will begin at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh and move on to more than 25 North American markets.