"Lennon" Gets Reimagined

The producers of Lennon are reworking the musical before it hits Broadway. The show, based on the life of John Lennon, opened April 12th in San Francisco's Orpheum Theatre to middling reviews and mediocre sales. It was scheduled to begin a month-long engagement at Boston's Colonial Theater on May 31st, but that has been cancelled to accommodate script changes.

"We're retooling the first act to make the storyline more linear," says director-writer Don Scardino. "The goal is to clarify it so that people who don't know the story can connect with it . . . I was surprised to learn that a lot of people aren't familiar with John's story."

The show features two previously unreleased Lennon songs, "India India" and "I Don't Want to Lose You," but none of Lennon's Beatles material. "It was my idea that if we were going to do Lennon's story, it should be told singularly," says Scardino, a longtime Beatles fan who was at the gate when the group touched down at New York's J.F.K. airport in 1964. "To quote John, 'The Beatles were an important part of my life, no more so than any other and possibly less than some.' The Beatles catalog is well covered, and I felt the Lennon songs told the story better."

The modified Lennon will debut at New York's Broadhurst Theatre on July 28th, and Scardino thinks the San Francisco run is cause for optimism. "We put it in front of audiences to see what worked and what didn't," he says. "We discovered that we have a show that appeals across the board to a wide demographic: Kids who knew nothing about Lennon were coming and were excited, and, of course, so were baby boomers."