Tell Me On A Sunday being reworked with gay male lead

Lyricist Don Black has revealed in an interview that he is reworking his and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s classic musical Tell Me On A Sunday with a gender flipped lead.

In an interview with the BBC, he revealed that he was working on these plans prior to the COVID-19 pandemic hit:

“Before coronavirus I’d started work on what I think is a great idea. We were trying out a new version of Tell Me On A Sunday, the musical Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote 40 years ago and I did the lyrics for. It was a hit in London and on Broadway.”

Opening in 1979, the original Tell Me On A Sunday was a one-woman show about the romantic problems of a young British woman living in the US. The lead has been performed by a number of female singers/actors, most notably Marti Webb, Bernadette Peters and Denise Van Outen. The new proposed version keeps the main structure of the story, but flips the woman out for a gay man.

Black went on to say that they had got so far as workshopping the concept with Rebecca Frecknall as director and stated he was excited about making it work – “we knew immediately it could open up resonant new areas of the story.”

Tell Me On A Sunday is a powerhouse of a show and the idea of it becoming a queer story could be amazing! Safe to say we’re excited to see what happens.