Rent Star Wants To Bring Operation Mindcrime To Broadway

Just saw this on Playbill (via Google Alerts)… In your Captain’s humble opinion, something like this is LONG overdue. I’ve personally hoped for a movie (starring Tom Hulce of course) ever since the album came out. Can’t wait to see the finished show!

Rent Star Pascal Wants to Put Operation: Mindcrime, the Musical, on Broadway

By Kenneth Jones
June 12, 2009

Adam Pascal, the Tony Award-nominated actor-singer known for his dual passions of musical theatre and rock music, is pursuing a dream he’s harbored since his teen years: to create a stage musical version of “Operation: Mindcrime,” the 1988 concept album by metal group Queensrÿche.

Pascal, currently starring in his Tony-nominated role of Roger in the new national tour of Rent, told Playbill.com that Queensrÿche (pronounced “Queens-Rike”) has given permission to — and will collaborate with — Pascal to conceive a Broadway-aimed musical of their popular recording about a brainwashed drug addict, Nikki, who becomes an assassin and seeks the love of a reformed hooker named Mary, who is now a nun.

The project is in the early stages, with no director, librettist, producer or music director attached, but Pascal said that Queensrÿche — including frontman and co-songwriter Geoff Tate and manager Susan Tate — has given him the go-ahead, and that the new musical will include new songs and connective material by the band.

Project conceiver Pascal said that the role of Nikki has been cast: He’ll play it.

The actor is a veteran of Broadway’s Rent (for which he was Tony-nominated as Best Lead Actor in a Musical) and Aida, and was a replacement Emcee in Broadway’s hit Cabaret. He starred in benefit concerts of Hair and Chess (and appeared in a London Chess concert with Josh Groban and Rent vet Idina Menzel) and is a rock presence in clubs and on his own rock recordings (”Blinding Light,” “Civilian,” “Model Prisoner”). He also co-starred in the film version of Rent, the smash hit by late composer-lyricist-librettist Jonathan Larson.

Pascal indicated that a natural launching place for Operation: Mindcrime is Seattle, where the band got its start in the ’80s. The actor is reaching out to his Broadway connections to put a creative team together.

“I’m talking to several different amazing book writers to transform this thing, and I need to hook up with a director because I want somebody to be with the project as it grows,” Pascal said, adding that he’d like to have a draft of the show ready for a spring 2010 reading.

The musical might incorporate some content from the 2006 follow-up album, “Operation: Mindcrime II,” but Pascal said that he had no interest in cobbling together a Queensrÿche “jukebox” show that might include, for example, the band’s non-”Mindcrime” hit, “Silent Lucidity.”

Plot-wise, he sees the show using the content of the first album, and looks forward to discussions with a librettist and director to determine the show’s setting and time period. Pascal said he loves the size of the Rent cast as a template for Operation: Mindcrime: maybe 15 performers.

Pascal said he felt like he was in a position in his career where he could probably get the show created and produced, so he approached the band.

“Queensrÿche, and especially their singer, Geoff Tate, if not for him, I wouldn’t be here right now,” Pascal told Playbill.com. “He’s the guy, when I was 12 years old, when I heard him sing and heard this band, I’d never heard anything like it before. I am definitely a product of wanting to — and trying to — sound like him all through those formative years of growing up and playing in rock bands and just idolizing this guy as a singer — and the band in general.”

When the record came out, Pascal said he “was floored — I had never heard anything like it. It was like a hard-rock version of [Pink Floyd's] ‘The Wall.’ Not in story, but in tone and in musical aesthetic, but a harder version of that. I’ve always been obsessed with the record.

“Throughout the years, I’ve envisioned how this can be turned into a real musical, a book musical. The concept album is not nearly as specific as [The Who's] ‘Tommy.’ It’s told in very broad strokes, so that it allows me a tremendous amount of freedom to create a story.

“[The album's] got plot points, things that happen to these characters, but it’s very non-specific. These characters can be any age, any ethnicity, they can have any backstory you want to give them…”