Stax Broadway musical being planned

[alanh]

It looks like one of the next musical stories to be featured on Broadway will be about Stax, according to the Concord website:

Concord Music Group and Academy Award-nominated and GRAMMY Award-winning producer Stuart Benjamin have begun development of a musical production based on the dramatic story of iconic soul music label Stax Records. The book will be written by Matthew Benjamin with a Spring 2016 Broadway premiere target.

The Stax Records saga—from its beginning in an old movie theater on East McLemore Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, to its extraordinary rise as an international hit-making machine—is an indispensable chapter in American musical history. Amid the civil rights-era racial strife and deep-seated tensions of the late '50s and '60s, Stax’s integrated artist roster and staff fundamentally shaped American soul music, spawning the careers of legendary recording artists, songwriters and producers, including Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, The Staple Singers, Albert King, Johnnie Taylor, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, David Porter, Rufus and Carla Thomas, and Steve Cropper.

[dickiemint]

There was a tour in the UK a couple of years back called Sweet Soul Music which covered all the hits of Stax and it was along the lines of Edwin Starr's Motown tour dancing in the street which he toured with Martha Reeves and Mary Wilson but there was no original Stax artists on the tour , even though it was really good, the audience were up dancing from start to finish