Nerds Reading, Booting Up for Broadway, Will Include Michael Arden, Kate Shindle, Charlie Pollock and More

By Adam Hetrick
19 Jun 2012

Michael Arden
Michael Arden

The new Broadway-aimed musical Nerds, about technology giants Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, will get a New York City industry reading with Michael Arden, Charlie Pollock, Heléne Yorke and Kate Shindle.

Nerds has music by Hal Goldberg and book and lyrics by two-time Emmy Award nominees Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiner (The Bomb-itty of Errors, "Robot Chicken").

Casey Hushion (Fat Camp) directs the June 21 reading, which has musical supervision by Nadia DiGiallonardo. Nerds is booting up for a Jan. 18-Feb. 3, 2013, out of town try-out at the North Carolina Theatre in Raleigh prior to a Broadway arrival next year.

Earlier incarnations of Nerds were presented at the 2005 New York Musical Theatre Festival and by the Philadelphia Theatre Company in 2007, where it earned Barrymore Awards for Outstanding Original Music and Outstanding New Play.

The cast features Arden (Bare, The Times They Are A-Changin') as Bill Gates, Pollock (Urinetown) as Steve Jobs, Yorke (Wicked) as Sally and Shindle (Wonderland, Legally Blonde) as Myrtle, as well as David Rossmer (Peter and the Starcatcher) as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mark Price (Mary Poppins) as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Gabriel Ebert (4000 Miles), Tom Deckman (Spamalot) and Scott Barnhardt (Book of Mormon).

Nerds is billed as "an irreverent new musical comedy satirizing the parallel stories of computer pioneers Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as they blaze a path from humble garage inventors to warring titans of the computer revolution."