Jay McInerney’s career-making debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, will soon be opening on Broadway.
A musical adaptation of the novel is coming to freeFall theatre, opening on February 28 and running through March 22, according to Broadway World. The musical will be faithful to the original spirit of McInerney’s story, which Broadway World describes as “the sordid urban adventures of a dissolute fact checker as he plummets through a boomtown world of nightclubs, bars, models and cocaine.”
Cast members include Lucas Wells (Spring Awakening), Clinton Harris (American Stage’s Rent and Hair, and Scott Daniel (The Scott and Patti Show).
In 2013, Chapter 16 spoke with both McInerney, a former Nashvillian, and his longtime friend Gary Fisketjon, who was also the editor of Bright Lights, Big City. In that conversation McInerney recalled the apartment he and Fisketjon shared during the early 1980s: “Fortunately, we kept the same hours, which were night-owl hours, and we had some really good parties at this loft that Gary had in East 5th Street that I would often—summers when I was in graduate school, I would be in residence at East 5th Street, and we would have some crazy parties. And, in fact, that apartment was where I wrote the first page of Bright Lights, Big City. I came home one night about five in the morning, and I just jotted down those lines that survived intact and that I found again later in a drawer.”
To read the full interview, click here.
For more updates on Tennessee authors, please visit Chapter 16’s News & Notes page, here.
Tagged: Fiction
