Director Jerry Zaks Plugs Into Nerds Musical

By Kenneth Jones
September 19, 2008

The Broadway-bound musical Nerds, about computer giants Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and their colleagues, is getting a Tony Award-winning download in 2008-09: Jerry Zaks is now the director.

Zaks, a four-time Tony Award-winning director, confirmed his participation to Playbill columnist Harry Haun on Sept. 18. A production spokesperson could not confirm any details; full creative and casting for the musical are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. The Broadway launch is expected to happen in spring 2009.

With book and lyrics by two-time Emmy Award nominees Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiner (Off-Broadway's The Bomb-itty of Errors, TV's "Robot Chicken") and music by Hal Goldberg (The Children), Nerds — seen developmentally at the 2005 New York Musical Theatre Festival and in a production by Philadelphia Theatre Company — 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!"

The show, no longer subtitled "a musical software satire," earned 2007 Philadelphia Barrymore Awards in the categories of Outstanding Original Music and Outstanding New Play.

Zaks earned Tonys for directing The House of Blue Leaves, Lend Me a Tenor, Six Degrees of Separation and Guys and Dolls.

The musical's story "begins long before the existence of e-mails and iPods, when two ideas are born that will one day change the world." Nerds "hilariously celebrates the birth of computer technology and the two pop-culture icons that made it possible, with a rollicking original score."