How Elton John plans to make ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ fit this fashion moment — the new musical opens soon in Chicago
NEW YORK — Pushing 76 years old, not that he looks remotely like it, Elton John is finally coming off the road.
John’s epic, worldwide, farewell stadium tour (which includes a goodbye Chicago stand on Aug. 5 at Soldier Field) became an even longer goodbye due to the pandemic and he’s said, many times now, that he now wants now to be home with his kids. “I don’t want to play live again,” he says over a Zoom call, “because it means I would have to travel.”
He’s also scored several Broadway musicals in the past — “Aida,” “The Lion King,” “Billy Elliot” — so he knows that they have to be wrestled into fruition, require much on-location tinkering and revision, take years to come together (or not) and are, generally, a pain in the neck for someone well past retirement age who has been so busy he couldn’t even make the queen’s Platinum Jubilee in person.
But when your husband is co-producing a Broadway musical with the title “The Devil Wears Prada,” a musical based on a movie where Meryl Streep, playing a thinly veiled version of fashion guru Anna Wintour, eats a dismissive underling played by Anne Hathaway, herself a thinly veiled version of the writer Lauren Weisberger, for breakfast before spitting her remains
