New Ringo Starr & Dave Stewart Musical?

Ex-Eurythmics star Dave Stewart has provided the additional music and lyrics to the musical Ghost which is currently playing at the Piccaduilly Theatre in London's West End and due to open at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on April 23, 2012.

He has now joined forces with  Beatles drummer Ringo Starr to write a Broadway musical with Starr saying: "Me and Dave wrote a musical, a complete thing - characters, story, a lot of songs. We wrote it for Broadway, but it will more likely end up as a movie... and I'm not telling you anything else. It's about other people".

The collaboration came about when Stewart wrote several tracks for Starr’s new album Ringo 2012 which is due for release on 30th January.

Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart Writing New Musical about Bar Italia

With his new musical Ghost in the pre-production stage and due to open in London’s West end next year, Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics has announced that he is working with Porridge and The Likely Lads writer Ian La Frenais on a musical about Bar Italia which is a famous London Café in Soho. 

The musical has been inspired by the Polledri family who opened Bar Italia in 1949 to cater for immigrants in London's Italian quarter and who still run the cafe. It was one of London's first continental coffee shops and it’s still going today with Dave Stewart as one of its famous customers.

He will be able to draw on the real cafe's colourful history for material as it was opened by US superstars Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and is a favoured haunt of celebrities ranging from Rocky Marciano to Francis Ford Coppola. The cafe was in the thick of Soho's gang culture, with notorious fights taking place outside and customers with mob connections.

Stewart said: "This coffee shop is very small but what goes on in there is as big as the world. It's about la famiglia - about an Italian family out of place in the middle of Soho, where there are strip joints and everything, and they're a little Catholic family opening a coffee shop. You've already got that great juxtaposition."

The show will tell the fictional story of the owners' son who is lined up to take over the cafe but becomes involved with local criminals.

There are no dates mentioned yet, but will keep you posted.

Ghost the Musical to premiere in London next year

Dave Stewart (pictured) is working on three musicals at the moment with the Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore hit movie “Ghost” being ready to open in London in April 2011.

The impressive team includes Dave Stewart and Glenn Ballard who are writing the score. They are both Grammy award winning musicians. Dave Stewart is perhaps best known for The Eurythmics with Annie Lennox and Glen Ballard is a six-time Grammy award winner, producing artists such as Michael Jackson, Aerosmith, Van Halen and Alanis Morissette. The other members include the screenwriter of the Oscar winning Ghost script Bruce Joel Rubin and Tony award winning director Matthew Warchus.

Ghost will be directed by Matthew Warchus. Set and costume designs are by Rob Howell, Musical Supervision is by Christopher Nightingale, Choreography by Peter Darling and Illusions by Paul Kieve. 

For those who haven’t seen the film Ghost is story about the power of love. Couple Sam and Molly are mugged one night on the way home to their apartment and Sam dies on the dark street. He becomes trapped as a ghost between this world and the next and unable to leave Molly who he learns is in grave danger. With the help of a phoney psychic, Oda Mae Brown (played in the film by Whoopi Goldberg) he tries to communicate with Molly in the hope of saving and protecting her.

It has the very moving and intimate scene with with Molly at her potter’s wheel and Sam as a ghost helping her throw a pot to the background music of The Righteous Brother's Unchained Melody.