Tired: rebooting old TV shows as TV shows (or even movies). Wired: rebooting old TV shows as Broadway musicals. As per Deadline, The Nanny — the beloved ’90s sitcom in which Fran Drescher’s aggressive Queens native and fashionista played Julie Andrews to a trio of snooty rich kids — is being turned into a musical, by Drescher as well as one of the genre’s latest stars, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend honcho Rachel Bloom.
A Nanny revival has been in the cards for a while now, although it wasn’t clear if it would get the band back together — among them dad Charles Shaughnessy, butler Daniel Davis, antagonist Lauren Lane, and children Nicholle Tom, Benjamin Salisbury, and Madeline Zima — for a Netflix/Hulu/Amazon series or a full-stop reboot or what. At one point Drescher was talking of re-casting it with Cardi B.
But maybe it makes more sense to revive The Nanny on the Great White Way. Drescher and fellow show creator Peter Marc Jacobson will write the script while the almost certainly self-aware-but-not-too-cutesy numbers will be written by Bloom and her CEG comrade Adam Schlessinger, who both won an Emmy last year for their show’s songs.
Alas, Drescher will probably not be returning as hero Fran Fine, joking that, “Of course I would do it myself but we’d have to change the title to The Granny.” As for the idea of turning the sitcom into a Broadway spectacular, it makes sense if the sitcom is The Nanny. The in-the-works show’s director Marc Bruni, of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, even described the show as a twist on The Sound of Music: “what if instead of Maria Rainer with her guitar, Fran Fine showed up on the doorstep of a fractured family?” Indeed, a Sound of Music riff but with a brassy Jewish Julie Andrews sounds dynamite.
(Via Deadline)
