Courtney Love is starring in a new musical called Kansas City Choir Boy?

January 5, 2015

David Hudnall,

In cool-seeming, vaguely local news: Courtney Love — Hole leader, wife of Cobain, occasional tabloid bait — will be starring this week in a musical called Kansas City Choir Boy. It’s being staged in New York as part of Prototype, a festival devoted to modern opera and musical theater.

Written by Todd Almond, Kansas City Choir Boy is about what happens to a young couple in Kansas City when one moves to New York to pursue her dreams. Or, according to Playbill, it is:

“…a theatricalized concept album about love altered by unexpected fate. A mystery told through flashbacks, the show tells the story of two lovers in small town America who separate when one goes in search of destiny and then disappears. Borrowing themes from ancient myth, the show features songs by acclaimed composer/lyricist Todd Almond performed by rock icon Courtney Love and Mr. Almond. They are joined by a chorus of sirens, and musicians from Contemporaneous Ensemble.”

Almond told The New York Times recently that the idea came to him several years ago while staying in a hotel room in Kansas City.

More than a decade ago, he [Almond] had been hired by the Juilliard School of Music to do a musical adaptation of “The Odyssey.” The actress who played Athena disappeared and was later found murdered; he was watching TV news when her face suddenly came on screen. Some years later, around 2006, he was in a hotel room in Kansas City, Mo., writing music with his laptop when “the face of a missing girl popped up on the news.” It elicited a memory of the woman who had played Athena; he started imagining her as someone who “ran off to the big city to make something of herself, and then she fell into the wrong hands.”

Kansas City Choir Boy is Love’s first musical. But if it does well in New York, the production may travel elsewhere.

“It’s like putting out a single,” Love told the Times. “If it gets catchy, then we do it in London or something. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. We think it’s really catchy and fabulous.”