“The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey is set to make a stage musical about Luciano Pavarotti.
The Australian director, producer and visual effects artist — who more recently executive produced Elton John biopic “Rocket Man” and helmed Robbie Williams movie “Better Man” — has revealed that plans are on track to produce his long-gestating bioplay on the New York stage about the late great Italian tenor, who broadened the audience for opera and became a global pop culture icon.
“The person who had the rights to do Pavarotti on the stage called me after he saw ‘The Greatest Showman,’ but they didn’t have a way into the story,” Gracey said during a master class held at Italy’s Marateale Film Festival. “So I went to Bologna to spend time with Pavarotti’s friends and family to see if I could work out a way into the story, which I did.”
“We don’t want to give away any spoilers,” said producer Tarak Ben Ammar, who has a close rapport with Gracey and was co-moderating the master class. “But the interesting thing about Gracey is that he always tries to find a different way into the characters he depicts,” Ammar added, citing the use of a CGI monkey to play Williams in “Better Man.” Ammar subsequently specified to Variety that he is not involved in Gracey’s Pavarotti stage project.
For the Pavarotti bioplay, Gracey is planning to work with a software program designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to separate Pavarotti’s voice from recordings of his performances, as the director previously revealed.
Nicoletta Mantovani, who is Pavarotti’s second wife, confirmed to Variety that Gracey has the rights for the Pavarotti stage project and that the bioplay is on track.
Born in 1935 in Modena into a working-class family — his father was a baker, while his mother worked in a cigar factory — Pavarotti developed a passion for opera as a child thanks to his father, an amateur tenor. Known for his vibrant signature high Cs and knack for showmanship, he became the most beloved and celebrated tenor since Enrico Caruso and one of the few opera singers to attain crossover fame.
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As previously revealed exclusively in Variety, Mantovani recently announced a separate deal with prominent Italian film producer Pietro Valsecchi (“Quo Vado”) to develop a high-end Pavarotti biopic that is being penned by ace Italian screenwriter Leonardo Fasoli, a head writer on the popular Italian series “Gomorrah.”
From Variety US