Homer Hickam's Rocket Boys to Premiere as Staged Reading Performance at Merrimack Hall
The “rocket’s red glare” will illuminate Huntsville’s Merrimack Hall Performing Arts Center this Memorial Day weekend as Rocket Boys, a new Broadway-bound musical based on the #1 NY Times best selling book by Homer Hickam, presents its first concert reading. Actors from both New York and Alabama will participate in the launch of this wonderful new work, performed without costumes or scenery. Included in this special theatrical experience will be a brief welcome by Mr. Hickam just prior to the reading. The cast and creative team will also meet and greet the audience afterward.
Rocket Boys, Homer Hickam's 1998 memoir of his life growing up in a West Virginia coal mining town has become a classic, assigned in nearly every school system across the country, one of the most picked books nationally for community/library reads, translated into many languages, and adapted into the award-winning movie October Sky. In the memoir, Homer (called Sonny then) is inspired as he watches Sputnik streak across the 1957 October sky. To the consternation of the citizens of Coalwood, he and several boyhood friends decide to join the space race by building rockets, thus launching themselves and the entire town on an unexpected and dramatic trajectory. Mr. Hickam not only became a NASA engineer but the author of many highly-successful novels. “Although I've done a lot of things in my life," he says, "working for NASA was the completion of a boyhood dream and I loved it!" He and his wife Linda are long-time residents of Huntsville, and are thrilled that a musicalized stageplay of his memoir will reach an entirely new audience of people around the world looking not only for good foot-stomping entertainment but the courage to follow their dreams.
From the very beginning, the musical adaptation of Rocket Boys has ignited an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the theatre community. With a score by Dan Tramon and Diana Belkowski, stage adaptation by Christopher Budinich, and direction by Carl Anthony Tramon, it has already received numerous awards. It was one of just three winners to receive the coveted ANMT Search for New Musicals Award in Los Angeles, and was recently a winner of the ASCAP / Disney Musical Theatre Workshop in New York, with Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Godspell, Rags, Pippin) at the helm. It was the Composer/Lyricist team’s second consecutive win (unprecedented for this award), having won the previous year with their show Flyer, about the lives of the Wright Brothers.
NY Producer John O’Boyle (Radio Golf, A Catered Affair, Is He Dead) is an active member of the team and is guiding the show’s progress. “This project has absolutely unlimited commercial potential,” observes Mr. O’Boyle, who has been a cheerleader for the show from the start. The show is especially fueled by the commitment of the author himself, and the script is being developed in close consultation with Mr. Hickam.
This early concert rendition will be an exciting “sneak-peek” of the coming full production, which will undoubtedly inspire countless rocket boys and girls for light years to come! For more information visit www.rocketboysthemusical.com.
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