Saturday Night Fever – the musical
It lasted twenty years before someone got the idea of making a musical out of the successful movie. That someone was Robert Stigwood, who had also produced the movie. On May 5, 1998, Saturday Night Fever's world premiere took place in London. In October 1999 it also starred on Broadway. At the moment the musical is visited by thousands of people in Sydney (Australia), Cologne (Germany) and Utrecht (the Netherlands).
In the latter country, where I enjoyed Saturday Night Fever yesterday, the starring roles are orchestrated as follows:
It was the British journalist Nik Cohn who is the actual initiator to Saturday Night Fever. Some 25 years ago, he wrote an article in New York Magazine on disco, called Tribal Rites of the new Saturday Night. In that time, to many people disco was a shocking phenomenon. During his research in Brooklyn, Cohn ended up in Bay Ridge where he saw some guys fighting in front of a discotheque. Cohn's eye fell to one of the spectators. The guy in the blinding white suit was not only handsome, but his allure of strength and ambition did not seem to fit in the poor Bay Ridge area. When producer Robert Stigwood read the article, he saw the perfect movie script. Scenario writer Norman Wexler transformed the Cohn article into a screenplay.
In spite of the quality of the dancing, scenery, acting or (ahem) story, it's the music that makes Saturday Night Fever. Right after visiting the musical, I was in even higher spirits when my girlfriend casually remarked she actually possessed the soundtrack (on matchless black vinyl). So we wiped off the dust and enjoyed all these rolling songs again and again:
Some information from http://www.saturday-night-fever.nl/