Oct 2: Almodóvar’s Movie Musical

If it sometimes feels like Pedro Almodóvar’s gloriously absurd films are crying out to be made into song and dance productions, that’s because some of them started out there. It was Pina Bausch’s piece Café Müller that inspired (and opens) the 2002 film Talk to Her; 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was an Almodóvarean riff on Jean Cocteau’s short one-character play The Human Voice. This month Women on the Verge arrives at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre (October 2 to January 23, 2011) as a musical directed by South Pacific’s Bartlett Sher and starring Sherie Rene Scott, Patti LuPone, de’Adre Aziza, and Nikka Graff Lanzarone. Scott is Pepa—played by Carmen Maura in the highly farcical movie—a woman who is jilted by a “rat” of a man, concocts a suicidal brew of gazpacho and sleeping pills, sets her bed ablaze with a cigarette, and becomes entangled with Shiite terrorists. And that, of course, is just the beginning.

Courtesy of Lincoln Center Theater