Romeo and Juliet Musical The Last Goodbye, Featuring the Songs of Jeff Buckley, Aims for Broadway

One of the most talked about musicals of the fall season is The Last Goodbye, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set to the music of the late Jeff Buckley. But a Broadway transfer of the show, which opened on October 6 at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, may have to wait.

“My guess is gonna be we’re going to need another developmental production,” producer Hal Luftig told The San Diego Union-Tribune. “The first thing we’re going to do is we’ll finish this run [on November 3], and then the whole team will get together, probably in late November” to discuss “what worked and what didn’t work. And nothing is sacred.”

As previously reported, The Last Goodbye stars Broadway vet Jay Armstrong Johnson and Talisa Friedman as the doomed lovers in a production conceived and adapted by Michael Kimmel and directed by Alex Timbers.

Luftig, a Tony-winning producer of Kinky Boots, told the San Diego newspaper that he had provided enhancement funds of more than $1 million for the Old Globe production, and said that he envisioned an eventual Broadway production being budgeted as “much less” than Kinky Boots’ $13.5 million capitalization.

“It’s getting harder and harder to just leap onto Broadway,” Luftig noted. “We did a little bit with Kinky Boots because we had to. It worked, but it was scary as well. And it could’ve easily just gone the other way, only because these things take time to develop.”