Wedding Singer Composing Team Working on Musical of Film "Elf"
By Robert Simonson
28 Apr 2006
The songwriters for the upcoming Broadway musical The Wedding Singer and the upcoming Get Shorty — composer Matthew Sklar and lyricist Chad Beguelin — have another theatre project on their plate.
The duo are working on a stage version of the popular 2003 Will Ferrell comedy "Elf," about a man-sized elf in search of his true self.
"It's about a Christmas elf in the real world," Beguelin told Playbill.com columnist Harry Haun. "They actually came to us with that one. That's another New Line newbie, and they said, 'Listen, we think you're great for this,' and we loved the movie. It's another instance of a property where everyone has a very specific point of view. All the characters have a very specific history and have a very specific point of view, which makes it easy to write."
The Wedding Singer opened on Broadway April 27.
The 1995 film "Get Shorty," which featured a screenplay by Scott Frank based on the Elmore Leonard novel, is also a future plan.
Lyricist Beguelin previously told Playbill.com, "We're currently writing a musical version of Get Shorty, which is completely different from [The Wedding Singer]. It's another movie where I went, 'I love this movie. I adored the book.' I went in to Clear Channel, which had a deal with MGM, and I said, 'I want to do Get Shorty,' and they thought I was crazy.
"But it's like City of Angels, it's like Guys and Dolls — mobsters making movies. We wrote a song for them called 'The Girl with the Scream,' and we sent it to them, and they said yes. And, then we had to get Elmore Leonard to say yes, so we sent him the song, and he said yes. We've got most of Act One done and about half of Act Two."
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